Re: [RFC] make wext wireless bits optional and deprecate them

[Dan Williams <dcbw@redhat.com>]

On Mon, 2008-05-19 at 14:16 +0200, Johannes Berg wrote:
> > Instead of testing for wireless/, best thing would probably be to call
> > SIOCGIWRANGE on the device and if it returns EOPNOTSUP then it's not
> > wireless.  Some drivers may have to load firmware to figure out
> > supported rates and encryption capabilities, but to be honest, NM does
> > this to detect wireless devices and I haven't run into any issues in 4
> > years using it.  If there are issues with drivers, then we need to fix
> > the driver too.
> 
> I was about to propose calling SIOCGIWNAME since that is what
> wireless-tools do and that linux/wireless.h indicates.

Hmm; NAME is pretty useless.  That's fine to do, I guess WEXT requires
that NAME return _something_ at least.  NAME should never ever be used
for anything more, but since wireless-tools appears to do this that's
fine.

Dan