Why can't ASUS do what Merlin does?

[neil0311]

Asus should react as fast as Merlin does...

So why don't/can't they? I want to thank Merlin as well for his great work, but it does beg the question why one person can achieve what presumably the manufacturer, with greater resources and insight, is unable to achieve. Maybe a better angle to come at it from is what is Merlin doing that allows him to address this stuff so quickly?

Why can't Asus do exactly the same things Merlin is doing and squash bugs and expose new features without introducing new bugs....and do it within days and not weeks or months? I work in software, so I understand development and project cycles, and this question has perplexed me.

 

[rlcronin]

So why don't/can't they? I want to thank Merlin as well for his great work, but it does beg the question why one person can achieve what presumably the manufacturer, with greater resources and insight, is unable to achieve. Maybe a better angle to come at it from is what is Merlin doing that allows him to address this stuff so quickly?

Why can't Asus do exactly the same things Merlin is doing and squash bugs and expose new features without introducing new bugs....and do it within days and not weeks or months? I work in software, so I understand development and project cycles, and this question has perplexed me.

Go read The Mythical Man Month, maybe? When you have too many people grouped into complex hierarchical organizations, it can be far more difficult to get quality product out the door compared to small teams of unencumbered subject matter experts ...

I second all the compliments for Merlin's firmware. I do enjoy the stability and the nice extra features, but for me the most important reason is that there's a competent, responsive person there to provide support when I need it. I know its not a guarantee, but in practice it is a lot easier than trying to get support from Asus. I even made a donation (and suggest anyone else who gets real value out of Merlin's firmware do the same).

As an aside to Tim, what I'd like to know is why you're asking?
--
bc

 

[RMerlin]

So why don't/can't they? I want to thank Merlin as well for his great work, but it does beg the question why one person can achieve what presumably the manufacturer, with greater resources and insight, is unable to achieve. Maybe a better angle to come at it from is what is Merlin doing that allows him to address this stuff so quickly?

Why can't Asus do exactly the same things Merlin is doing and squash bugs and expose new features without introducing new bugs....and do it within days and not weeks or months? I work in software, so I understand development and project cycles, and this question has perplexed me.

Asus devs do a LOT of things with each new firmware release that I don't have to do. That makes a huge difference:

1) Asus has to develop and test for at least 18 different devices (based on the number of available profiles in the build system). I only have to deal with 3.
2) Development of AiCloud, DownloadMaster - two areas I don't have to touch
3) Support for all type of Internet connections: DHCP, PPTP, PPPoE, etc... I've been stuck dealing with PPTP support for Russian users myself - I will have to find time to build a test PPTP setup to reproduce the environment used by those Russian ISPs.
4) Support for two different hardware platforms (Broadcom and Ralink). I only support Broadcom.
5) Support for the DSL hardware of some of their routers (based on comments I see throughout the code it seems there is one person dedicated to that aspect alone)

Every time Asus makes a new firmware release, the first thing I do is a full source compare (through diff) of the last and the latest source code. That allows me to see everything that Asus has changed in the new version. And sometimes the amount of changes can be impressive.

I understand (and sometimes share) people's frustration with some of these bugs that seems to take forever for Asus to fix, but to their defense, they still do a lot more work than I do myself. For this they have my respect.

 

[neil0311]

Asus devs do a LOT of things with each new firmware release that I don't have to do. That makes a huge difference:

1) Asus has to develop and test for at least 18 different devices (based on the number of available profiles in the build system). I only have to deal with 3.
2) Development of AiCloud, DownloadMaster - two areas I don't have to touch
3) Support for all type of Internet connections: DHCP, PPTP, PPPoE, etc... I've been stuck dealing with PPTP support for Russian users myself - I will have to find time to build a test PPTP setup to reproduce the environment used by those Russian ISPs.
4) Support for two different hardware platforms (Broadcom and Ralink). I only support Broadcom.
5) Support for the DSL hardware of some of their routers (based on comments I see throughout the code it seems there is one person dedicated to that aspect alone)

Every time Asus makes a new firmware release, the first thing I do is a full source compare (through diff) of the last and the latest source code. That allows me to see everything that Asus has changed in the new version. And sometimes the amount of changes can be impressive.

I understand (and sometimes share) people's frustration with some of these bugs that seems to take forever for Asus to fix, but to their defense, they still do a lot more work than I do myself. For this they have my respect.

So obviously the more test passes and use cases, the more effort required. I guess I wasn't aware that they use one code base for their firmware and it can be used on all their routers. I assumed (incorrectly) that they build for specific router versions.

Thanks for the insight. After being a Netgear user for many years, I'm really loving the Asus router, the great firmware support, and the easy options for firmware upgrades. It's night and day from Netgear.

 

[RMerlin]

So obviously the more test passes and use cases, the more effort required. I guess I wasn't aware that they use one code base for their firmware and it can be used on all their routers. I assumed (incorrectly) that they build for specific router versions.

Thanks for the insight. After being a Netgear user for many years, I'm really loving the Asus router, the great firmware support, and the easy options for firmware upgrades. It's night and day from Netgear.

All Asus routers with a firmware version starting with 3.x is running the same Asuswrt codebase. Some of those I mentionned haven't been upgraded yet to Asuswrt and are still on 1.x or 2.x proprietary code, but they are slowly migrating them. The RT-N56U was recently switched to it for instance.