Button in LuCi to install overlay packages defined in installed_packages.txt

It is now possible with sysupgrade to get a list of your user installed packages (on the overlay) and have this put in installed_packages.txt which is preserved during a firmware upgrade.

However there appears to be no easy way to install these missing packages (for newbies) so what I purpose is putting a button on the Backup / Flash Firmware page to allow end-users with one click to install these missing packages (assumes working internet).

It would also be useful to have the option to create the installed_packages.txt and update it if required when generating a config backup

relates to https://github.com/openwrt/luci/issues/4160

[luizluca]

One of the problem is packages like libwolfssl4.7.0.66253b90. This is the package name. The version is 4.7.0-stable-2. There could well be a different libwolfssl after the next update.

In the real world, it just works. I’ve been doing that since before 19.07 when -k was upstreamed. If a failed package installation does not prevent others to be installed, it might work as expected. OpenWrt repos do not keep old versions. So, if a package is simply an old requirement and it is now missing, the real software will require the correct dependency.

I’m just more cautious between major release upgrades. I normally simply ignores all lib* packages during that reinstall, as it might include unnecessary packages, and let the system download the recent dependency. With minor releases, I simply do a blind “install all”. Excluding reboot/download/install times, it take me less than a minute of attention for each upgrade.

I still think a list of packages to (tentatively) reinstall after the software update would be a better idea, and it should be built-in to sysupgrade, not LuCI.

I believe that Luci should not be the one responsible for coding that. It should be a standalone utility/service/hotplug script, probably optionally enabled during backup by a sysupgrade flag. For now, I wrote a “reinstall” reinstall.gz script that I’m carrying between upgrades (‘sysupgrade -o’). It is not ready for upstream but it does get the job done. I manually run it after each upgrade, saving me a lot of time. It has a primitive text-based interface and it will do nothing you didn’t asked it to do.

[shoulders]

The button could run something like

# opkg update
# grep "\toverlay" /etc/backup/installed_packages.txt | cut -f1 | xargs -r opkg install
# rm /etc/backup/installed_packages.txt
# reboot

Taken from here https://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg43129.html