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

Paul Bolle
2014-12-31T16:43:15Z

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