On 26-27 June 2009 a Linux wireless mini-summit was hosted by the Fedora project as part of their FUDCon event in Berlin, Germany. This event was attended by well over a dozen upstream Linux developers representing various kernel wireless LAN drivers, kernel wireless LAN infrastructure components, and related userland applications. Attendees also represented hardware vendors, Fedora and other Linux distributions, and other members of the overall community. Discussions covered a number of development issues, including status updates related to recent developments and preliminary design discussions for future API enhancements. In particular, the face-to-face involvement of hardware vendors revealed the need for a "testing mode" extension to the new cfg80211 API for wireless LAN configuration. One of the attendees is a voting member of the IEEE802.11 standards body, and he gave a very useful overview of current standards activities and their likely impacts on Linux over the next few years. On the BarCamp day of FUDCon some of the wireless attendees provided content for two one-hour slots. One of these was an introduction for would-be developers to understand the basics of the wireless LAN APIs in the kernel. The other was split between a short overview of some of the powersaving improvements happening for wireless LANs and an interesting presentation on Freifunk, a community-based free wireless LAN deployment in Berlin. The Freifunk presentation also touched upon some similar projects ongoing throughout the world. Given my position as the Linux kernel wireless LAN maintainer, I found this meeting to be extremely valuable. Developers are far more productive when they know each other and have some personal connections. Further, face-to-face meetings enable fast-paced discussions that would be difficult or impossible to complete in an electronic (i.e. email, IRC, etc) environment. Keeping these people working well together is the key to further improvements and successful maintenance in RHEL, Fedora, and the rest of Linux community. On behalf of the upstream Linux wireless LAN developer community, I would like to express our gratitude to the Fedora project for doing its part to enable our continued progress. Of course, I also want to thank the wireless LAN developers (and those who may have sponsored their travel) for coming to the event. You guys are the ones who make all these good things happen. The fact that you are all friendly and cooperative makes things even better! I enjoyed seeing all of you in Berlin, both the ones I had already met and the new faces as well. I look forward to our next opportunity to meet face-to-face, and I anticipate lots of productive email between now and then! Thanks! John -- John W. Linville Linux should be at the core linville@xxxxxxxxxx of your literate lifestyle. -- 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
