Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S964882AbWJCSOM (ORCPT ); Tue, 3 Oct 2006 14:14:12 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751025AbWJCSOM (ORCPT ); Tue, 3 Oct 2006 14:14:12 -0400 Received: from ra.tuxdriver.com ([70.61.120.52]:25869 "EHLO ra.tuxdriver.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751023AbWJCSOK (ORCPT ); Tue, 3 Oct 2006 14:14:10 -0400 Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 14:05:50 -0400 From: "John W. Linville" To: Linus Torvalds Cc: Lee Revell , Alessandro Suardi , Norbert Preining , hostap@shmoo.com, ipw3945-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, Andrew Morton , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, jeff@garzik.org, johannes@sipsolutions.net, jt@hpl.hp.com Subject: Re: wpa supplicant/ipw3945, ESSID last char missing Message-ID: <20061003180543.GD23912@tuxdriver.com> References: <20061002085942.GA32387@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> <5a4c581d0610020221s7bf100f8q893161b7c8c492d2@mail.gmail.com> <1159807483.4067.150.camel@mindpipe> <20061003123835.GA23912@tuxdriver.com> <1159890876.20801.65.camel@mindpipe> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2220 Lines: 52 On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 09:27:34AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > We don't do this version skew dance. If we need to break something, it had > better be some damn substantial reasons, and even then we're generally > better off supporting _both_ interfaces for a while (perhaps using a > version code), and then marking the old one deprecated. FWIW, this clean-up is not intended to break older binaries. It is intended to standardize driver implementations of the WE API. Breakage is (merely!) a side-effect... The overall purpose of the WE-21 patch was to continue disambiguating how drivers implement the WE API. This is intended to (hopefully) avoid strange, hidden bugs lurking out there in driver/tool interaction, especially for tools other than wireless-tools (e.g. NetworkManager, wpa_supplicant, etc). In this case, it looks like maybe some older versions of these tools were effectively exploting the strange, hidden bugs... :-( It seems there were a few genuine bugs which crept into the WE-21 implementation. Jean has posted fixes for those today. It looks like those patches get things working again when combined with updated tools. Today's news seems to indicate that at least the major distros are already shipping the updated tools, or on the verge of shipping them. The window of breakage for most users looks like it will be fairly small, no matter what action taken. The more we can clean-up the WE API, the easier it will be to implement the cfg80211 WE compatibility layer intended for wireless-dev. I think WE-21 makes things better in that respect. Finally, I already scaled-back Jean's original WE-21 patch. I only anticipate minor bug fixes for WE from now on, with nl80211/cfg80211 as the heir-apparent. With all that said, I'd prefer to keep the existing WE-21 patches and add Jean's fixes ASAP. Is this acceptable? If not, I'll submit the reversions to Jeff ASAP. Suggestions? John -- John W. Linville linville@tuxdriver.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/