Removal request: madwifi, madwifi-tools

[Felix Fietkau]

Kel Modderman <kel <at> otaku42.de> writes:
> the following facts are true (correct me if wrong):
> 
> * we must revert to a snapshot of madwifi.org trunk at svn revsion 3314,
>   madwifi.org trunk is at revision 3856, the package in Lenny is based
>   on a branch of revision 3772. This means discarding a few hundred commits
>   to some point in time when the fork was taken.
See below.

> * we must apply all patches: [...]
>   that's a lot of patches! who has reviewed them? who has tested them?
They haven't received much public review yet, but I did receive some feedback
from various random people looking at them.
For me it boils down to this: What do you prefer, something which quite a few
people successfully use on embedded hardware and which maybe has a chance
of working well for laptop users as well, or something which is already known
to be broken for many people?

> * we must trust a binary HAL that was only announced to the public on the
>   16th of September 2008 by Scott Raynel, who announced it because Felix
>   couldn't really be bothered.
There were multiple parties involved in the HAL release. The announcement on
the DD-WRT site was done by DD-WRT people, the announcement on the OpenWrt 
site was done by me (OpenWrt developer). The release date was communicated to
the madwifi project in advance and the announcement itself was posted as news
entry with little delay.
Since I had lots of other stuff to deal with (just moved from Hamburg to 
Berlin yesterday), I chose to leave MadWifi's announcement part to the MadWifi
project.
Anyway, so why do you put the HAL binary trust issue in the same category as
the lack of a real announcement to the list?

I have been actively working on fixing whatever HAL issues were reported from
MadWifi users, and I will continue to do so, until ath5k is at the point where
it fully replaces MadWifi.

> I do not like the idea for _Lenny_. I do not like that this is a fork of the
> existing project. It indicate that Felix does _not_ want to put effort into
> supporting madwifi (which is not just users of it, but developers of it too),
> he only has time to put effort into Felix version of madwifi, which is
> primarily targetted at users of embedded devices and primarily serves the
> needs of Felix and his clients.
Sure, I did put effort into supporting madwifi. When I started building my
patch stack on top of r3314, I gave several madwifi developers all the info
that they neeeded to evaluate my patches and decide whether or not to commit
them into the madwifi svn. I specifically told most of the active developers
what to merge, what to leave alone until it stabilizes, which patch implements
which functionality and why, etc.
I only stopped when I found that the MadWifi developers didn't really have
time or didn't care to review my stuff - and I couldn't stay in sync with
trunk because of constant random breakage going on there, which would have
used up more time than I could spend on this driver.
Of course, my primary intention was to have a stable wifi driver for OpenWrt,
but please don't accuse me of not putting any effort into supporting MadWifi,
which is something already disproved by the fact that I worked hard on making
this coordinated HAL release happen. I could easily have turned it into
something OpenWrt and DD-WRT specific, but I really wanted the MadWifi project
and its users to have their share of the fun as well.

- Felix


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-release-REQUEST at lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster at lists.debian.org