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

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

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 07:15:31PM +0200, Johannes Berg wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-05-17 at 15:45 +0200, Marcel Holtmann wrote:
> > Hi Johannes,
> > 
> > > The /sys/class/net/*/wireless/ direcory is, as far as I know, not
> > > used by anyone. Additionally, the same data is available via wext
> > > ioctls. Hence the sysfs files are pretty much useless. This patch
> > > makes them optional and schedules them for removal.
> > 
> > it is used by HAL to classify WiFi network cards as net.80211 instead  
> > of net.80203 and so we do have an actual user. However HAL only tests  
> > for the existence of the directory wireless/.
> > 
> > Please fix HAL first before submitting such a patch.
> 
> I have filed a patch to fix HAL to use the canonical SIOCGIWNAME at
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16037. Any further
> objections to this patch?

I think this is going to fall under the "userland ABI" category.
We can make it a configurable option, but I don't think we are free
to remove it completely since there is at least existing versions of
HAL that use it.

John
-- 
John W. Linville
linville@tuxdriver.com