TomatoUSB

Does anyone know if there is an optware version of redsocks available? I would like to be able to transparently tunnel https through Tor, and it looks like redsocks is the application that can do that.

I decided to make my own package. So far it has been a learning experience, but not in the good way. To me it looks like Optware has basically been abandoned since 2010. The svn repository and forked git repositories are not really source code at all. Rather they are complicated trees of makefiles and patches, with a few obvious syntax errors. e.g. One of the common files uses + = instead of +=. Another uses spaces where it needs a tab, … Not that many, but just enough to tell me nobody is submitting updates or fixes. They are just fixing them locally and doing there build.

The bigger problem is of course that there is no actual source code. All the source code is retrieved via wget from various websites and then patched. In many cases, the specific versions being referenced do not exist any more on the specified website. In some cases I managed to find the source code on other websites, and in others I managed to substitute different versions of the code. However, if I am applying a patch made for one version to another and not looking at the results, who knows what kind of errors are being introduced in the build. While I don't need to build all the packages to create and add a new one, I decided it would be a worthwhile to do so. That is still in progress, but I see many of the builds have failed simply due to missing source code.

I was wondering, does anyone know of an optware fork that resolves some, or all these issues.

If not, I am thinking it might be worth my time to try and do my own fork of optware where I have it build from source packages of a common distribution such as ubuntu or fedora. Then at least there won't be going out to random sources to collect everything… There would probably still need to be optware specific patches. Ideally what one would really want is "optware" source packages that are posted right along with the binary packages, just like all the big boys do…

For now I'll concentrate just on making my redsocks package. But if anyone can point me in the right direction for the above issues I would appreciate it.

did you look to see if Entware offers a solution?

No I had not heard of Entware until now. It looks like it maybe exactly what is needed. I'll replacing optware with entware on one of my routers and see how that works out.

OK. I had a look at Entware, and installed it on my router. It is a more current code base, and the resolve the cross compile build environment issue by just using openwrt's build tools. Still though, they suffer from the same fundamental problem. There is no actual source in their distributions, just makefiles with wget scripts. So eventually the primary developer will get busy doing something else, and it will fall out of sync until nobody can build it. Still, maybe they will be open to improving their distribution to resolve this issue.

As far as software quality. I found it slightly better than optware. Of the 7 services I run regularly under optware, I found 5 of them available for entware. The version numbers were identical, so I was able to just copy my configuration files. I put in a request for the 2 others I need to migrate my to entware, as well as a request for redsocks. If that happens, I'll probably migrate to entware and see what I can do to contribute and improve the distribution so won't become abandon ware. Unfortunately though, the discussion forum is completely in Russian, so that will make it rather difficult to collaborate.

Hi!

Still though, they suffer from the same fundamental problem. There is no actual source in their distributions, just makefiles with wget scripts.

By starting Entware we've got two ways:

• Fork current OpenWRT trunk and live with it for ages and becomes old as Optware with time.
• Make our project as a bunch of patches to current OpenWRT trunk. So all bleeding-edge OpenWRT's features will be with us as long as OpenWRT evolving.

So eventually the primary developer will get busy doing something else, and it will fall out of sync until nobody can build it.

Source packages are mirrored on OpenWRT servers and on our server. If some source package on it's homepage has been deleted/changed, then it will be downloaded from OpenWRT mirror or from our own mirror. If we'll place package sources to our trunk, it will be bloated as a DD-WRT, where "svn checkout" downloads 35GB.

Also Entware project maintains own packages feed - "rtndev" - for packages not covered by OpenWrt