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

Grumbach, Emmanuel
2014-12-31T11:11:02Z

> On 12/30/14 23:52, 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.
>
> Hi Jiri,
>
> You mentioned in the discussion and I quote: "*If* wireless maintainers think
> otherwise, I'll send a revert request to Linus for consideration.". However,
> you did not wait for any response from the wireless maintainers nor from the
> author of the patch you are reverting.
> Seems like an overreaction to me though personally I do not disgree with the
> revert itself.

Not to mention the patch has already been applied on Linus's tree...

>
> Regards,
> Arend
>
> > [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