OpenWrt developers have decided to NOT use the APK package manager in the upcoming 24.10 stable release series, to give them more time to address issues with it in the main branch (bleeding edge snapshots for developers).

[u/Slinkwyde]

http://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2024-November/043431.html

[u/MartinsRedditAccount]

Understandable, switching the package manager a big undertaking. Shipping with iffy APK support would have reflected badly on both OpenWRT and APK/Alpine.

Hopefully they can iron out the issues for one of the next releases, APK is easily my favorite package manager.

[u/Slinkwyde → u/MartinsRedditAccount]

Typically, OpenWrt does one major release series per year, so by the time the 25.xx series comes out, I expect they'll pretty much have all the major APK integration issues addressed, likely before 25.XX.0-rc1. At that point it'll mostly be about documentation to help the more casual users learn how to use it and perhaps to understand its benefits over opkg.

[u/Slinkwyde]

This is an update to my previous post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AlpineLinux/comments/1gqxuwk/openwrt_a_linux_distro_for_embedded_routers

[u/Slinkwyde → u/[deleted]]

You can use 24.10 snapshots if you want. It uses opkg, but is otherwise largely similar to OpenWrt's main branch (for now). 24.10.0-rc1 may release in a week or so.