Is there a reason we can't just import all devices supported by OpenWRT?

[Darin755]

If I were to create a PR with 1000 new devices would it be accepted? I don't own all of those devices but I can pull them off the table.

[nemesifier]

Hi @Darin755, thanks for your question. I am honestly not sure right now.

The list of devices changes constantly, some are added, some are removed. Some definitions and labels change in each OpenWrt version.

If we add thousands of lines of codes but nobody is using those lines of codes.. who is it going to maintain them?

If we want to do something like this, it may be more appropriate to look for a way to automate this so we can be confident the list stays up to date over time and can work with different OpenWrt versions, but this is not a trivial challenge. It would be great if the OpenWrt project offered some sort of structured data we could pull periodically to build our list. Maybe they do and we are not aware of that?

Let me ask you a few questions to understand your point of view. Why are you prompted to do this?
Are you using this module and often need to add more devices, which are not included in the list?

[Darin755]

That is what I am trying to figure out. I do like the way the OpenWRT firmware selector works.

https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/

Maybe we could add all devices but instead of just listing them in a giant drop you could add a search with search suggestions. Doing that would take a little be of doing so putting the currently supported devices in a json for now might be a good way to future proof.

It really depends on what you guys want. I am happy to help and I would love to see all devices supported for convenience reasons.

[nemesifier]

The questions which come to my mind:

• What are the criteria for adding/removing device models? Popularity, used by OpenWISP project members, added/removed by PR's, etc?

The criteria for devices listed in hardware.py should be devices which are supported by OpenWrt or were supported before (and OpenWISP also supported those here, so removing them would cause issues to existing installations using those devices).

• Do we really want to have a list with 1000 device models? I can imagine this would get confusing in terms of usability when searching/selecting a device...

In the latest version we're already using the select autocomplete widget to avoid having problems with the length of the devices.
But we'd have to see if having a giant list would cause problems elsewhere. In that case we'd have to rewrite this part.

Another thing to consider is that OpenWISP might rather be used by organizations and less by individuals. And organizations might have a limited set of device models which they can add with OPENWISP_CUSTOM_OPENWRT_IMAGES. So it might not make much sense to include a list of 1000 device models, anyway.

This is the reason for which it hasn't been a pressing issue. Nonetheless, having away to automate the compilation and maintenance of the list would surely be helpful, provided we keep in mind backward compatibility.

[Darin755]

So do you want new devices in hardware.py exclusively? I am trying to figure out how I should implement this. I first choice would be a json but that can change based on what kind of changes you would accept.

[nemesifier]

It's better to use python files, we already have a lot of logic and QA checks to enforce readability and correctnes.
Instead of one giant file, we could have one file for each target and then import/load everything in one file which is then loaded from hardware.py.

In the future, hardware.py will load definitions for multiple systems, not only openwrt.

[Darin755]

Thanks that makes sense. I'll look into it