On Fri, Apr 28, 2023 at 12:58:40PM +0200, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote: > > Out of interest: Is there a reason why FRR doesn't just use babeld, but > > something of its own? [...] > FRR's code is derived from a port of a very old version of babeld to > Quagga, which was done by Matthieu Boutier and myself. Paul Jackma (the > maintainer who ended up killing Quagga) invented a lot of spurious reasons > not to merge our code into Quagga. When FRR was forked from Quagga, > Donald Sharp did a lot of good work to clean up and merge Matthieu's code. > > Unfortunately, the FRR folks never got around to updating FRR's Babel code > to either merge a more recent version of babeld or do their own updates > with what we've learned since then. I'm sure they'd accept a patch, but > I'm not sure I can do the work myself (merging changes is a dull and > error-prone job, it requires a kind of engineering discipline that > I simply don't have).
Good summary, thanks Juliusz! Unfortunately there just doesn't seem to be enough interest from the FRR community; it's kinda understandable considering FRR has gotten rather datacenter heavy. While we certainly get some questions and issues regarding BABEL on FRR, there's noone putting effort into development / maintenance. Honestly I'm really unsure where to go with FRR's copy of babeld. I don't like carrying around a version that people can (and will) mistakenly use without being aware of how outdated it is. I did think about putting in the effort of "re-porting" current babeld, but that's not very helpful if noone maintains it afterwards. If someone is interested (and can spare some of that "engineering discipline" you mention, Juliusz - it is a very limited resource...), I'd be happy to do that "re-port", I can probably do it much faster than most other people. Just without anyone to tend to it afterwards I'd feel like I'd just be wasting the effort :(. FWIW, as much as it pains me, maybe we need to remove FRR's babeld. At some point it just becomes harmful, and I fear we may already have passed that point. If there is indeed consensus in that regard, I'll regretfully volunteer to take the executioner's job and axe it out :( Sigh... equi _______________________________________________ Babel-users mailing list [email protected] https://alioth-lists.debian.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/babel-users
