On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 9:22 PM, Luis R. Rodriguez <mcgrof@gmail.com> wrote:
quoted text
> On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 3:33 PM, Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, 2008-05-22 at 00:13 +0200, Fabrizio Regalli wrote:
>>> Hi Nick and thanks for your reply.
>>> Sorry for delay.
>>> Do you know if is there a debian package of compat-wireless ?
>>
>> I don't see compat-wireless in the list of Debian packages
>> (http://www.us.debian.org/distrib/packages)
>>
>> The whole point of having compat-wireless it to allow compiling the
>> current wireless drivers on older kernels, including kernels provided by
>> distributions.  If distributions were to package compat-wireless, it
>> would be inevitably behind the current code, simply because no
>> distribution would be able to update it daily.
>
> This is true unless your distribution works on source based compile
> installs, like Gentoo, which does seem to have a package for it. Or
> unless the building of a package for this is automated somehow for
> binary-based distributions. I actually think letting distributions
> give users somehow the option to run the latest and greatest drivers
> for their distribution kernel *right now* is a great feature. This
> would hopefully encourage more integration of out-of-tree drivers into
> the kernel and also allow users to get the drivers they may need
> easily instead of having them hunt down drivers on the net or
> compiling their own kernel. I'd even think this might be something
> worth-while for the other subsystems as well. But that's just a
> thought.

Hmm, actually I just thought of the biggest problem if we start
relying on this for other subsystems or if distributions do pick this
up and start relying completely on it. Although you do get new shiny
drivers with compat-wireless like tarballs userspace applications for
the distribution were compiled *with* the old kernel headers therefore
not being able to able to make use of the new interfaces unless they
are also recompiled. This is not an issue unless you need new
userspace application interfaces of course. An example that comes to
mind is making use of iw [1] for use with nl80211 for shiny new
nl80211 commands like for Mesh.

Of course a patch to userspace applications is possible to get your
userspace applications to compile to compat-wireless like applications
(like the one below for iw) but in general I think its best to just
consider it a hack for now to get users up to speed with new drivers
until their distributions pick up new kernel releases, and that's it.
If users or distributions users of this don't mind recompiling the
userspace applications themselves then at least they know what they
are getting into but userspace application binaries must have been
compiled with the same the compat-wireless release currently used.
That is if compat-wireless is packaged by binary distributions then so
should an iw for specific compat-wireless releases, which seems
awfully painful. The alternative I guess is to just have a
compat-wireless which is built daily and an iw-latest which is also
built daily against the same compat-wireless.

[1] http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Documentation/iw

diff --git a/defconfig b/defconfig
index 346f699..64dcda8 100644
--- a/defconfig
+++ b/defconfig
@@ -11,8 +11,9 @@

 # Kernel location for GIT NL80211 kernel code (assumed to be running,
 # by default); only required if your installed nl80211.h is out of date.
+COMPAT_WIRELESS = /home/mcgrof/devel/compat-wireless-2.6/
 CONFIG_KERNEL_LOC = /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/
-CFLAGS += -I$(CONFIG_KERNEL_LOC)/include
+CFLAGS += -I$(COMPAT_WIRELESS)/include -I$(CONFIG_KERNEL_LOC)/include

 # LibNL location
 # (if not installed in a way that makes the compiler/linker find it)
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