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.

It was about time, opkg is the worst package manager ever.

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.