Lack of maintenance for osmo-bts-trx

Dear all, I am growing incredibly frustrated at the fact that osmo-bts-trx is effectively unmaintained, despite the fact that there are plenty of users as well as even commercial users / companies (particularly Fairwaves). I'm not pointing Fairwaves out because I am associated with sysmocom. I'm pointing them out as for me as Osmocom project founder and co-maintainer, I sincerely think something is wrong here. And particuarly commercial vendors of BTSs using the Osmocom stack should at the very absolute minimum ensure proper maintenance of their own hardware support in the respective Osmocom projects. They should equally consider contributing to maintenance and developemnt of the 'core' code of those projects, too, in order to fairly share the burden of that effort. I explicitly asked for proper maintenance of osmo-bts-trx first in August 2014 in this post: http://lists.osmocom.org/pipermail/openbsc/2014-August/007657.html Back in 2014 and the first half of 2015 I spent a lot of time in forward-porting and cleaning up the the (fairwaves-commissioned?) l1sap changes, as well as the associated osmo-bts-trx port. Back then, there were several patches in related (several) branches that I could not merge. See my mail (and follow-up mails) from http://lists.osmocom.org/pipermail/openbsc/2015-September/000379.html Ever since the merge in August 2015, as far as I recall, I never saw a single message from any osmo-bts-trx user whether a) the L1SAP merge back then works for them b) it introduced any regressions The same happened after the phy_link/phy_interface merge. While some people think I sometimes write good code, I fail to believe that all those intrusive changes didn't break anything for OsmoTRX users. Still, no feedback and no fall-out was reported. Like any larger project, particularly one with different hardware support, we need somebody with essential interest in that hardware to maintain the respective back-end. Think of device driver maintainers in the Linux kernel as an example. For osmo-bts-sysmo, it is clear that sysmocom has such a vital interest, and that it is the primary hardware on whcih Holger and I are working on. For osmo-bts-octphy, Octasic funds related maintenance work to be done at sysmocom. We need a sub-maintainer for osmo-bts-trx, one who 1) consistently follows the developments in master and checks for regressiosn 2) fixes osmo-bts-trx specific bugs like the fact that GPRS measurment values are not passed to the PCU, breaking rate/link adaption for this platform 3) tests interoperability with OsmoTRX and other OpenBTS transceivers out three 4) ensures that important osmo-bts-trx related patches/branches end up in master, ensuring that master is what people use. Telling users to use a branch different than master is *wrong* for anything but the most bleeding edge / experiemental code which is to be merged ASAP. I thus strongly suggest that the users and proponents of osmo-bts-trx get together and see how they can ensure the proper maintenance of this port. Thanks for your consideration. Regards, Harald -- - Harald Welte <laforge(a)gnumonks.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)