On Thu, 2008-09-18 at 10:35 -0400, John W. Linville wrote: > Add checks for kernel version to enable features in the iw tool. This > allows packagers to get pre-package the tool without requiring precise > timing to stage the tool into their distributions. I'm afraid it's not a good approach. Suppose a distro takes this version of iw and Linux 2.6.27. Later it issues an update for the kernel that updates it to 2.6.28. Userspace tools don't normally depend on the specific version of the kernel, and that's a good thing. But in this case, it means that iw won't be recompiled and updated unless the distro has some mechanism in place to detect such need. Since the kernel version detection is done on the compiler level, I suspect such need won't be detected. The end result is that iw won't be able to access all functionality of the kernel. I believe userspace tools should always do the best effort to support all functionality they can support, but fail gracefully if any kernel functionality is not available. Keeping a local version of nl80211.h in iw sources seems the most sensible solution to me. It has its downsides, but the upside is that there is a clear separation between the userspace and the kernel code. I know something about Fedora packaging and I assisted developers of other userspace tools with similar issues. Of course, opinions of the actual package maintainers would have more weight. -- Regards, Pavel Roskin -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
