Mutability fork - variance in goals vs PiAware?Future merge?

Morning gents,

I seem to getting quite into the swing of this ADSB lark!

Have an Rpi running PiAware, in the attic and about to fit PoE and a few other tweaks.

In the not-too-distant future, I can see me installing Mutability…

So, my questions are this:

  1. What are the goals / intentions of Mutability - more importantly, how do they differ from the “official” version?
  2. I’m nervous of breaking the “official” PiAware upgrade function etc. Am I better to start again, installing Mutability on a full distro, rather than PiAware?
  3. Assuming the intentions and goals of mutability and the “official” version are not mutually-exclusive, could we ever see a time when the benefits of mutability are merged into the “official” PiAware trunk?

I’m thinking #3 addresses #2, for myself and others.

NB - I appreciate ownership / control may be an issue with #3, no offence or “stirring” intended!

get another SD card - so you don’t break the original - and play with it.

Official Code?

I’m not sure there is such a thing - all this software is based on dump1090 which (I believe) is publicly distributed code written by an enthusiast, who for whatever reason stopped updating it.

Malcolm Rob then picked up the baton and did some further development of the code.

The people at flightaware picked up the MalcolmRobb code and modified it for their own purposes.

Obj (user on this) site has done the same and picked up the Malcolm Rob code and the Flight Aware code, mergrd the changes then made very extensive modifications to improve compatibility with standard Linux update tools, aircraft detection, elimination of unlikely data (in that data beyond a range will be incorrect and can be dropped)

If doing mutability - it may be easier to start with standard Raspberian, then add mutability and the PiAware feeder than start with the preconfigured image.

Mostly it is about scratching itches - bugfixes, fixing rough edges, adding features where needed to plug other stuff in.
Originally much of this was going into pull requests back into the upstream (MalcolmRobb) version, but unfortunately all has gone quiet on that front so I seem to be doing general maintenance too.

  1. I’m nervous of breaking the “official” PiAware upgrade function etc. Am I better to start again, installing Mutability on a full distro, rather than PiAware?

If you are happy with maintaining the system yourself, then I would suggest starting from a non-Piaware distro; the piaware image works well as something that can be dropped in if you have no Linux background and don’t want to maintain it yourself, but it’s not so great once you start changing things. You’ll have to manually upgrade piaware when the version changes, but that’s not a big deal and personally I’d rather have it that way than have the system try to upgrade itself automatically.

  1. Assuming the intentions and goals of mutability and the “official” version are not mutually-exclusive, could we ever see a time when the benefits of mutability are merged into the “official” PiAware trunk?

I don’t know what FlightAware’s plans are here; the code is GPL so they can certainly pick up and use my changes if they like.

Thanks guys - think I’ll let my new antenna location bed in a bit, then have a look at Mutability on a new SD card.

Not completely au fait with Linux, but work in IT / Marketing so am more than comfortable with these things in general.

Keen to learn and challenge myself (which is why I got into ADSB), so as long as there’s info on how to do these things, I’ll be fine.

Thanks for your help, gents.

Keep in mind that there are two ‘mutability’ packages:
dump1090-mutability (which many people use, even with the PiAware image and which is mostly discussed here)
piaware-mutability (I guess this sees less usage. Info here: http://discussions.flightaware.com/ads-b-flight-tracking-f21/piaware-mutability-packages-released-t19751.html?hilit=mutability)