[ath9k-devel] [Madwifi-devel] MadWifi reference edition

[Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>]

Hi Michael,

On Thu, 14 Nov 2013 08:06:04 +0100
Michael Renzmann <mrenzmann@madwifi-project.org> wrote:

> Hi Pavel (and all),
> 
> the webserver including the svn repos is back online. Sorry for the
> delay, but I don't check the various mailing lists on a regular
> basis. Threfore it's better to send me a personal mail if there's any
> issue with the server.
> 
> I recently moved a copy of the comlete repos, including the full
> history, to sf.net. My intention is to keep the repos - and in a next
> step also the website - there, so that I may be able to shut our
> server down at some point.

Thank you for your effort!

> Is your github fork meant to be a permanent institution? If so, I'd
> vote to point people there by default, and keep the svn repos for
> history only. Please let me know what you think.

I'm fine with that.

I feel more freedom about applying patches to the sources that are not
the official MadWifi project.  I would not make such big changes as the
removal of support for Linux 2.6.12 and older in the MadWifi subversion
repository, as I would feel obliged to ask in the lists, and I don't
think I would hear anything interesting back.

But if the MadWifi site just points to my repository and says that I'm
maintaining MadWifi in a separate repository, that would be a good
solution.  I would have the moral obligation to keep it working, but I
would be free from the need to consult with the (barely existing)
community.

The reason for dropping support for Linux 2.6.12 and older is that I
found a dubious PDE macro that conflicted with the changes needed to
support procfs changes in Linux 3.10.  I tried to compile Linux 2.4.22
and found that I need so many things just to configure it and prepare
for building modules - old compiler, old make, and even bash was giving
me trouble so I had to use ksh.  And then I would not be able to run
that kernel on my hardware.  To understand the changes made to the
kernel, I would need to download historic Linux repositories converted
from bitkeeper.  I wrote scripts to test MadWifi with a large set
of kernels (https://github.com/proski/kernel-farm), but it would need
to be adapted for the 2.4 build system.  That was way too much effort.

Linux 2.6.13 was a natural cutoff point as it introduced WPA and WPA2
in wireless extensions 18.  As we know, WEP is not considered secure
these days.  Yes, MadWifi could support WPA on older kernels, but it
was ugly.

I don't expect to apply any big changes, but I will apply bugfixes and
cleanups (in reasonable amounts).

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin