OpenWRT Version diffing tool

Motivation & executive summary

We should have a way to track differences in versions across versions of custom firmware release compared to upstream releases.

Things to note:

• OpenWRT produces a manifest file with the packaged versions of the packages in a release.
• OpenWRT is a very minimal operating system that doesn’t have many packages; ~130 in total. Downstream distributions might have more packages, so we need to consider all the upstream packages.
• We need the build manifest for the downstream firmware.

How it works

Compare the versions of the packages in our base firmware image to the upstream packages. If the package doesn’t exist, ignore. If the package has the same version, ignore it, if our package is outdated print out a warning.

Installation

Disabling CGO might not be necessary, but the program is developed and tested with CGO disabled.

CGO_ENABLED=0 go install github.com/celerway/openwrt-versions

Usage

The resulting cli should work like this:

$ openwrt-versions -release 23.05.5 celerway-2.12.0-86-64.manifest
Name           | Upstream               | Downstream            
---------------+------------------------+-----------------------
base-files     | 1562-r24106-10cc5fcd00 | 1586-r24106-10cc5fcd00
ipset          | 7.17-1                 | 7.6-1                 
libipset13     | 7.17-1                 | 7.6-1                 
ugps           | 2021-06-08-5e88403f-2  | 2022-02-19-fb87d0fd-2 
wireless-regdb | 2024.10.07-1           | 2024.07.04-1          

The look will find the OpenWRT release manifest and package index itself, then go through the supplied manifest and highlight any outdated packages.

Development

Development hygiene

Maintain a clean codebase by running the following commands:

golangci-lint run

Tag a release:

Use bump to tag a release:

bump (-patch|-minor|-major)

See bump for more information and source.