Bug#499537: ITP: iw -- tool for configuring Linux wireless devices

[Kel Modderman <kel@otaku42.de>]

On Wednesday 24 September 2008 07:55:04 Guus Sliepen wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 07:05:20AM +1000, Kel Modderman wrote:
> 
> > > > * Package name    : iw
> > > >   Description     : tool for configuring Linux wireless devices
> > > 
> > > Is this going to replace wireless-tools, or is it to be used in conjuction with
> > > wireless-tools?
> > 
> > As I understand it, it would ultimately supercede wireless tools, but there
> > would be an extremely long overlap period. During which time, I have no idea
> > how they will co-operate, do you?
> 
> No :)

In the short term, I think that iw will not be useful in conjunction with any
Debian provided linux-image [0], and only of interest to Debian-its using some
wireless-testing tree (or branch of), thefore not much system integration is
needed yet. It's probably more important to have a recent version of iw in
experimental for the more curious people, and to send bug reports on to
Johannes. During this period we may get an idea about how to intergrate it into
Debian in a similar manner to wireless tools.

[0] for example it won't work with 2.6.26 without first fixing nl80211 bugs

> 
> > You are the maintainer of wireless-tools, would you like to help with or have
> > iw?
> 
> Well, I don't have any hardware that works with software drivers (yet), so it
> would be very hard for me to test iw. But I would like to work together to make
> sure there are no conflicts between the two tools, and perhaps to merge
> functionality where it can and should be merged.

Please consider being part of pkg-wpa team, or if that is undesirable the iw
package could be moved somewhere else where you feel comfortable working on
it in the future.

Thanks, Kel.