Feature Request: Updates without flashing

Suggest improvements and new features for Gargoyle.

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Lucky75
Posts: 83
Joined: Tue Mar 31, 2009 5:04 pm

Feature Request: Updates without flashing

Post by Lucky75 »

I was wondering how possible it were to have an update feature without having to reflash? I thought openwrt had it, so would it just be a matter of typing the correct command into the terminal?

I mean, a lot of the changes are to the shell scripts, right? Shouldn't it be possible to just wget updates or something? I suppose an option is to check out the code from svn and copy them over manually though. I just thought it might allow people to be testing on the latest version a lot easier without having to worry about reflashing so that the data/bug reports would be more consistent :)

Eric
Site Admin
Posts: 1443
Joined: Sat Jun 14, 2008 1:14 pm

Re: Feature Request: Updates without flashing

Post by Eric »

OpenWrt does have a new "sysupgrade" feature, that does re-flash, but saves the configuration files in RAM, and then copies them back. So the router does get re-flashed, but the configuration files are preserved.

I could certainly implement something similar but I'm hesitant to do that, at least now, because some of the configuration files are changing between releases too! I realize that's not really good... it prevents backwards compatibility, but Gargoyle is still in beta, and some changes are to be expected. When it reaches 1.0 (oficial) I may make a change such as this to facilitate upgrading.

Lucky75
Posts: 83
Joined: Tue Mar 31, 2009 5:04 pm

Re: Feature Request: Updates without flashing

Post by Lucky75 »

How difficult would this be to implement now that you seemed to have locked the config file structure?

Eric
Site Admin
Posts: 1443
Joined: Sat Jun 14, 2008 1:14 pm

Re: Feature Request: Updates without flashing

Post by Eric »

Sorry I haven't gotten back to this post for a while.. I actually sort of forgot about it down at the bottom of the forum :oops:

This request isn't too difficult... but it's still not a particularly high priority. Not saying never, but everything listed here has higher priority.

Lucky75
Posts: 83
Joined: Tue Mar 31, 2009 5:04 pm

Re: Feature Request: Updates without flashing

Post by Lucky75 »

Fair enough, though, to be honest, I would argue that it is just as important if not more so, since allowing upgrades without a reflash would encourage more users to upgrade more frequently, giving you better bug reports :)

uncle john
Posts: 146
Joined: Sun Jun 21, 2009 11:27 pm
Location: Australia

Re: Feature Request: Updates without flashing

Post by uncle john »

Eric wrote:OpenWrt does have a new "sysupgrade" feature, that does re-flash, but saves the configuration files in RAM, and then copies them back. So the router does get re-flashed, but the configuration files are preserved.

I could certainly implement something similar ...
Wouldn't it be more flexible to be able to upload and download the configuration file/s manually rather than have it happen automatically?
I'm thinking of something similar to the facility CoovaAP uses for configuration management: http://www.coova.org/node/229

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