Re: libertas (private) ioctls vs. nl80211

["John W. Linville" <linville@tuxdriver.com>]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 12:56:18PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Jun 2007 15:09:36 -0400
> "John W. Linville" <linville@tuxdriver.com> wrote:
> 
> > It does not make sense to me to rip this out purely for aesthetic
> > reasons.
> 
> Aesthetics are good, but that's not the main issue.
> 
> What is most worrying is that there appears to be a risk that these
> newly-added interfaces will later become obsoleted by another interface. 
> This means that we'll need to maintain, test and support _both_ interfaces
> for a very long time.  This is the sort of foot-shooting we should avoid.

True enough.  However, I hope you will agree that we should not
confuse foresight with speculation.

At present there is no sign on the horizon of either any mac80211
mesh code or any other full-MAC wireless driver supporting mesh.
Without either of those, it would seem imprudent to rush toward
a gneric configuration interface even if nl80211 was prepared to
sprout one.

John

P.S.  If someone wants to announce either mesh support for mac80211
or a driver for a new full-MAC device supporting mesh, I'm prepared
to be wrong! :-)
-- 
John W. Linville
linville@tuxdriver.com