Re: should we revert the cfg80211 API patches?

["Jory A. Pratt" <geekypenguin@gmail.com>]

Johannes Berg wrote:
> John,
>
> It appears that there's more trouble caused by my cfg80211 band API
> patch than people are willing to put up with. Tomas has already asked
> for it to be reverted, and neither Michael (Buesch) nor Stefano want to
> maintain two driver branches (one "stable" 2.6.25 branch and one
> "development" "for the future" branch).
>
> FWIW, I support your decision to not push this particular patch for
> 2.6.25, it really doesn't fall into the "tested well enough to merge
> during merge window" category.
>
> Additionally, since Michael Wu has (privately) announced to stop working
> on wireless, a number of drivers are effectively unmaintained now and
> I'm not sure I can quickly fix the breakage that my patch probably
> caused in those drivers, especially since Michael Wu is the only
> developer with access to all that hardware.
>
> To ease the short term pain, we can remove/revert the commits in
> question (those being 51c4c94e89a2042e8b20d640b49b6b605d71420d,
> 6854a5291cce341751a7e2e195cc3e97d95afeec and
> d0776155b288c20cc936bfd87d9a76255f244ed8).
>
> Maybe I should have waited longer or posted the patches earlier. I
> didn't post them earlier because I had not wanted to disrupt Intel's
> iwlwifi work too much knowing that there were patches, and then those
> patches caused bad breakage with my patch so I had to wait for another
> Intel patchset fixing a number of bugs they introduced... I'll admit
> that timing was horrible.
>
> But, I'll be frank, if the patches are removed/revert I probably won't
> continue maintaining them. I can't do much with these patches but
> continually forward port them on top of new driver changes which is
> boring and useless work. Experience has shown that hardly anybody but me
> [1] actually tests my patches until I push them into your tree, so
> continuing to forward port these patches won't actually help them become
> better but can only make sure they don't completely bitrot into
> oblivion.
>
> The only way forward I see if these patches are reverted is that we
> announce with the reversion that we'll merge them again in N weeks (with
> N being a reasonably small number, say 4-6) and until then people can
> test the patches and send me driver updates that I'll incorporate. But I
> don't see how useful that is vs. just leaving the patches in place and
> you managing the required driver updates.
>
> johannes
>
> [1] the only other people who test it seem to be mostly clueless people
> who want to get AP mode working and then ask me stupid questions in
> private... there are exceptions of course
>   
Reverting the patch is not the answer. Everyone just needs to step up 
and fix what they can. If maintainers are needed a call needs to be put 
out to find one.
The work is in the direction that moves wireless in linux toward that of 
a windows machine that the users want and need.

-Jory