Hi Kel, (mostly) just commenting on two aspects here, bcc:ing Felix again, so he can comment on the technical details. On Wednesday 17 September 2008 00:45, Kel Modderman wrote: > If forced between maintaining an awful snapshot of dead end crap for the > lifetime of Lenny just because I am not allowed to have it removed for what > I feel valid and compelling reasons, or getting to update the package > version (at an unsuitable time of release phase) to something that is > likely to be easily maintained for Lenny shelf life, I would probably take > my chance with a new version, even though I cannot properly test it. Great. > However that version would (most likely) be based on 0.9.4 and not > supporting new chips, like for example the one that Rene owns, or the chips > that Julien claim to be unsupported by ath5k, because the 0.9.4 branch is > the only branch on madwifi.org that functions with some integrity, but it is > based on an old binary which dictates hardware support. I have no idea on this one. > In fact I prepared an upload of 0.9.4.0 (which would supercede the current > SVN snapshot) and requested it to be uploaded but my request was ignored, > possibly because of pressure to keep a version of madwifi that supports > atheros hardware in recent mac's and eeepc hardware in the archive, I don't > know. Neither. Well, I have some idea: I know that Felix/the Openwrt branch is based on madwifi-0.9.4+r3314 from madwifi and then has approx 100 commits on top, incorporating the (useful) stuff from the forthcoming and parallel 500 commits in madwifi trunk. (Based on/written for the new binary Felix released.) But Felix needs to comment what that means for macs and eeepc (and other hardware (but I _assume_ basically all wlan capable hardware is supported by openwrt, as are the archs which matter for debian)). > The reaction against my proposal pisses me off, no-one comments on the > other reasons i put forward which make madwifi unsuitable for a long term > stable release, instead they just complain that there hardware won't be > supported by some non-free m-a package. They could at least offer to help > out with further action that may be needed during the Lenny lifetime or > something, to give me confidence enough to believe that the packages would > be providing good service to the users of Lenny. My last few requests few > new uploads simply fell on deaf ears, one may search the pkg-madwifi > archive on alioth if they need evidence of this. Well, on my usual atheros hardware I run openwrt currently and the time I had a thinkpad with atheros hw and running debian, I also used a madwifi driver from openwrt ;-) Thats why _I_ didn't comment earlier. (And I knew a bit about the driver mess and the new hal on the way...) Anyway. And as said in the previous mail, I think this hal can and will be maintained by Felix (and the madwifi stuff by all madwifi maintainers in Openwrt), so I see this as a good reason for letting it in and switching, even now. (At least compared to the other two options, removal or keeping the current version.) > BTW, I have pointed the kernel team toward a patch series which improves > the ath5k driver in linux 2.6.26. I also have facilitated the removal of > wpa_supplicant's specific madwifi driver wrapper some moths ago. I am not > mucking around here, if someone want to support this madwifi stuff let them > step up, it will not be me, by myself, any longer. I'm considering stepping up (not sure yet if I want to help out or really join the team...), if it makes sense for lennys lifetime... regards, Holger
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