[Babel-users] Babeld 1.9.1 in OpenWrt + documentation

[Baptiste Jonglez]

Hi,

On 31-08-19, Rich Brown wrote:
> I'm delighted to see babeld enter the OpenWrt mainline. This is a great day indeed - the culmination of a huge amount of work.

Maybe I was not very clear: babeld itself has been part of OpenWrt for a
long time, I was just referring to the update from babeld 1.8.x to babeld 1.9.x!

> I agree that documentation is an important piece of the entire product. And the OpenWrt wiki page still needs work, even though I bet that every word there is true.

So far, this documentation is indeed aimed at people who already know that
they want to use babeld, and who have already read and understood (almost)
every word of the babeld manual page.

> My biggest concern is that it's missing an introductory section that gives a motivation for using babeld. The text needs to help the new reader answer, "Does babeld offer something for me?" Other questions... "Why should I care? Why would I use babeld? What situations/configurations would benefit from babeld, and how would my life be better? Why choose babeld in preference to those other mesh-y packages such as Open-Mesh, OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N?"
> 
> That section doesn't need to be long: two or three paragraphs is probably enough. In fact, shorter is better. I am happy to help with wordsmithing, but I don't know enough about babel/babeld to get started...

Feel free to go ahead and write something like this on the wiki, you are
apparently in a good position to produce something accessible!

However, don't try to explain why somebody would need a routing protocol /
daemon: it certainly won't fit in two paragraphs, and it's much more
general than Babel (maybe this should go on wikipedia?)

Looking around a bit, I found a few pages that could serve as an
introduction to routing and wireless mesh networks:

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/routing
https://www.battlemesh.org/BattleMeshV4/MeshGuide
https://www.shadowandy.net/2016/03/building-wireless-mesh-network.htm

And this is a nice Babel documentation from the folks in Montréal:

https://wiki.reseaulibre.ca/documentation/babel/

More generally, Babel lacks some easily accessible tutorials.  Again
looking around a bit, I found just a few, but nothing very detailed or
recent:

http://www.makikiweb.com/ipv6/babel.html
https://witestlab.poly.edu/blog/babel-a-loop-avoiding-distance-vector-routing-protocol/
http://blog.multipath-tcp.org/blog/html/2015/01/19/babel.html
https://www.irif.fr/~jch/software/homenet/howto.html

Baptiste
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