As a long time OpenWrt user I’d say this is probably a change for the better, but I never had any real problems with opkg.
Hopefully it can actually preserve packages across updates which is incredibly annoying to have to handle manually.
The underlying tool is getting replaced in 23. The new tool requests the new image with the packages from the build server.
It was about time, opkg is the worst package manager ever.
So it’s a lot like apt, but with a huge name conflict.
He says it was unexpected but it’s been being talked about on the GitHub for quite some time now. It was really just a matter of when they decided to do it.
I had never heard of opkg. I looked it up:
opkg: Fork of ipkg lightweight package management intended for use on embedded Linux devices;
ipkg: A dpkg-inspired, very lightweight system targeted at storage-constrained Linux systems such as embedded devices and handheld computers. Used on HP’s webOS;
Wikipedia has no dedicated pages for either of them. I guess they’re quite niche.
I’ve never seen it used outside of OpwnWRT. I assumed they made it specifically for it.
There’s some usage in reMarkable: https://toltec-dev.org/
