[Babel-users] Babeld 1.9.1 in OpenWrt + documentation

[Rich Brown]

> 
> 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!

Well, then, I'm delighted to have babeld 1.9.1 in the OpenWrt mainline :-)

>> 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!

Thank you for your confidence. Just because I took a stab at the installation process on the Homenet page doesn't mean I really know what I'm talking about :-)

The links you cite (below) are helpful. Maybe I'll post a draft here for review. (It'll be a week or so before this comes to the top of the list.)

Rich

> 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