I write having become horrified by the lack of an upgrade process. Whilst there is the functionality to upgrade, there is certainly no process. Whilst some great work was done on a beautiful GUI that was clearly intended to be user friendly, one of the most basic things that any user would expect is a simple, pain free upgrade process.
Whilst it is true through adverse personal circumstances, that I am running a rather old version of OpenWRT now, what has become entirely obvious to me is that, regardless of whether I had updated more recently, I would have come up with issues explained to me on IRC as a change in schema leaving the import of backups at a high risk of bricking my router.
I have been told that I must manually re-install everything and manually add every setting for fear of bricking the router given that settings are not automatically converted to take into account developmental changes.
Seemingly, the ability to upgrade was an entire after-thought. For the amount of work that has been done on OpenWRT, whoever is responsible for upgrades has let the developers of other aspects of OpenWRT (or even themselves) down.
Somebody on IRC around a year and a half ago was kind enough to help me get my OpenWRT router up and running. He's not around anymore and I couldn't possibly remember everything that he did. I have over 30 port forwards alone.
That aside, even the most seasoned techie/engineer could not be expected to remember every piece of config and it is neither time efficient nor reasonable for one to have not forseen that there is an entire lack of any cohesive upgrade process when considering a router with such a competent GUI (suggesting user friendliness was high on the list of development priorities) in the first place. I have never come across any other software/firmware like this. Wow.
(Last edited by indieben on 6 Feb 2018, 15:16)
