[Linux-wlan-ng-devel] Bug#579875: clarify denial of package usefulness

[Tormod Volden]

On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 4:23 PM,  <jidanni at jidanni.org> wrote:
> TV> linux-wlan-ng is not needed for anything any longer.
> Hmmm, perhaps remove it from Debian?

Yes, that will happen sooner or later. For now we provide it as a
service to whoever still can make use of it. However it is unfortunate
if people bump into it and lose time on it when they don't need to. I
can make the wording stronger in the package descriptions, with more
disclaimers, to scare people away.

> Wait...
>  linux-wlan-ng-firmware-files: Depends: linux-wlan-ng (>= 0.2.9+dfsg-4) but it is not going to be installed.
> never mind.

Yes, the scripts for initiating the firmware loading is still in the
linux-wlan-ng package, while the linux-wlan-ng-firmware-files only
contains the prism2dl binary and the firmware files.

> # prism2dl -s wlan0
> prism2dl: No such device
> load_cardpda failed, exiting.
> # ifconfig -a
> wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:00:00:00:00:00  ...
> # ifconfig wlan0 up
> SIOCSIFFLAGS: Cannot assign requested address

It is possible that the newest kernel code has broken the userland
firmware loading. Now that kernel firmware loading is working fine,
userland firmware loading is obsolete and I guess it will not be fixed
or reintroduced. Unless some more general ioctl functionality is
broken. I can ask the kernel developers about this.