Roadmap

Last updated Gluon Meeting 2023-01 (on 15th Feb 2023).

This roadmap is not set in stone. It is supposed to give an overview and a basis for discussions of the future development of Gluon.

Especially keep in mind, that this is an OpenSource-Project and there just aren't any ETAs, as it depends on people's goodwill and free time to implement those features.

Currently working on

Here we document, what people are currently working on.

• OLSR v1/v2 (#2418, #2788 - mkg20001)
• Allow more flexible network setups (#2193 - lemoer)

Stale

Here we moved things from "Currently working on" where people did work on, but the approach went stale.

• respondd rework (mkg20001)
  • async data fetching (#2467)
• XLAT (#1808 - christf)
  • Maybe superseeded by this in the future (would be great if OLSR could support it too): https://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/babel-users/2022-March/003895.html
  • Most likely succeeded by IPv4 over IPv6 routing.
• RestAPI for Config Mode (#2296 - lemoer)
  • There is no urgent usecase for lemoer anymore.
• Babel support (christf)
  • Currently no community is actively using the babel features of gluon. So there is no active testing. See here: #2353.
  • We hope, that we can continue with IPv4 via IPv6 routing (without XLAT).
    • "IPv4 routes with an IPv6 nexthop"
    • https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9229.html

Wishlist

Here we write down ideas there are for the future and nobody picked them up yet.

• "Fallback autoupdater" (also known as Mesh Protocol-independent autoupdater)
  • Abbility for clients to fetch an update even if no mesh connection is there, for ex by connecting to FF via Client AP
• New respondd protocol (based on CoAP or HTTP?)
• New network setup based on network namespaces (for better separation of mesh and WAN on the nodes)
  • Issues we hope to solve by using network namespaces: https://github.com/freifunk-gluon/gluon/milestones/network-rewrite
• Single source of truth for config in Gluon
  • Currently partially implemented for network interface configuration ("role-based interface configuration")
  • Avoid upgrade scripts modifying complex UCI configuration, instead regenerate UCI config files on upgrade
  • Would require a unified way to allow user to preserve specific config sections, to prevent them from being made less useful by gluon
    • Currently network "gluon_preserve" flag
• DFS on 5GHz Mesh, also see:
  • https://github.com/freifunk-gluon/gluon/wiki/Meeting-2021-01
  • https://github.com/freifunk/projects.freifunk.net-contents/pull/56
• Support for more than two wireless interfaces
  • needs new approach for assigning mac addresses