[pkg-wpa-devel] wpasupplicant and madwifi

[Kel Modderman]

Hendrik Sattler wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I do not quite understand the reason for removing support for madwifi-old.
> Situation:
> madwifi-ng is supported by wext driver (there was a short transition period 
> before madwifi-0.9.0 where this was not the case).
> madwifi-old could stay supported by the madwifi driver.
>
> Thus, you have enabled doubled support for madwifi-ng and no support for 
> madwifi-old.
>   

The "madwifi-old" driver has been abandoned by upstream, and as I am 
also an upstream Madwifi developer/supporter, I chose to also cease 
support for this in wpasupplicant, as supporting that interface would 
soon become impossible. And if it were to be that way in Etch, then 
support would be required for many many months, thus I'd prefer to 
support something that is actively maintained.

> I will not report this as bug but since you could easily support madwifi-old, 
> it should be done. Note that the change madwifi-old -> madwifi-ng is 
> none-trivial and problems with madwifi-ng exist that madwifi-old didn't have!
>   
The major difference is that problems in the new madwifi have the possibility to be fixed, and the driver _will_ improve.

Madwifi.org and its team of maintainers have been very active in recent times. The first ever official release was made just months ago. Support is quite good; the trac ticket system for module maintenance and specific bug reports, mailing lists have good traffic and discussion again. This suggests that issues in the current driver have a better chance than ever to be addressed.

Madwifi in debian is up-to-date and should help aid in the upgrade/transition. hostapd in debian supports new madwifi only.

The wpasupplicant source package contains the madwifi-old headers dpatch, it can be recompiled for that support by following the instructions in the NEWS file.

Thanks, Kel.