On Fri, Jan 3, 2025, at 13:44, Johannes Berg wrote:
> On Fri, 2025-01-03 at 07:44 +0100, Philipp Hortmann wrote:
>>
>> One of my big fears is the hand over to the next generation maintainers
>> and developers. The less code and the less exceptions due to old
>> interfaces the easier it will be. We loose maintainers and developers
>> for many reasons, like: retirement, burnout, embargos or simply because
>> they are not paid and need to earn money. After giving some support on
>> the staging subsystem I cannot see at all that we can attract so many
>> talented people as required for a save future beyond 7 years...
>
> I wouldn't say that's necessarily a wrong sentiment, but I feel future
> maintainers can also make that decision, and if it's "years" in the
> future the relevance will only go down anyway.
>
> We just started putting some pressure into the system for removal of
> wext and nl80211 support (with WiFi7 devices no longer supporting wext)
> so chances are at least here the situation will change, and anyway wext
> stuff will become less relevant, perhaps to the point that other tools
> will drop support for it anyway. Not wpa_supplicant though, I suppose :)
I would assume that once removing CFG80211_WEXT becomes an option, we
can just put the remaining parts of net/wireless/wext-*.c into both
ps3_gelic and ipw2x00, duplicating and then simplifying the
implementation. As far as I can tell, there is very little that is
actually shared between the two anyway.
Arnd
