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

Jiri Kosina
2014-12-30T22:52:25Z

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

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
--
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs