Re: [PATCH] Revert "cfg80211: make WEXT compatibility unselectable"

[Paul Bolle <pebolle@tiscali.nl>]

On Tue, 2014-12-30 at 23:52 +0100, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> This reverts commit 24a0aa212ee2dbe44360288684478d76a8e20a0a.
> 
> It's causing severe userspace breakage. Namely, all the utilities
> from wireless-utils which are relying on CONFIG_WEXT (which means
> tools like 'iwconfig', 'iwlist', etc) are not working anymore. There
> is a 'iw' utility in newer wireless-tools, which is supposed to be
> a replacement for all the "deprecated" binaries, but it's far away
> from being massively adopted.
> 
> Please see [1] for example of the userspace breakage this is causing.
> 
> In addition to that, Larry Finger reports [2] that this patch is also
> causing ipw2200 driver being impossible to build.
> 
> To me this clearly shows that CONFIG_WEXT is far, far away from being
> "deprecated enough" to be removed.
> 
> [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1857010
> [2] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.network/343688

So [2] already entered mainline as commit dddd60220f41 ("ipw2200: select
CFG80211_WEXT"). As this revert has now been applied, I think my patch
should now be reverted too. But I don't think it's a good idea to submit
a patch, however trivial, in the last hours before new year. So I'll
have a look into this in the first days of next year.

> Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>
> ---
>  net/wireless/Kconfig | 2 +-
>  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
> 
> diff --git a/net/wireless/Kconfig b/net/wireless/Kconfig
> index 22ba971..29c8675 100644
> --- a/net/wireless/Kconfig
> +++ b/net/wireless/Kconfig
> @@ -175,7 +175,7 @@ config CFG80211_INTERNAL_REGDB
>  	  Most distributions have a CRDA package.  So if unsure, say N.
>  
>  config CFG80211_WEXT
> -	bool
> +	bool "cfg80211 wireless extensions compatibility"
>  	depends on CFG80211
>  	select WEXT_CORE
>  	help


Paul Bolle