Re: [PATCH] Revert "ipw2200: select CFG80211_WEXT"

[Arend van Spriel]

On 01/03/15 23:28, Paul Bolle wrote:
> On Sat, 2015-01-03 at 10:07 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 10:02 AM, Marcel Holtmann<marcel@xxxxxxxxxxxx>  wrote:
> > > why would you revert this? It is obviously the correct change to actually select CFG80211_WEXT.
> >
> > I don't know about obvious, but yeah, I think the select in this case
> > is actually the better idea anyway.
>
> Obviously it wasn't obvious to me!
>
> My reasoning was that the "ipw2200: select CFG80211_WEXT" commit was
> _solely_ a workaround for the breakage introduced by that other patch.
> And since that one is now reverted the workaround wasn't needed anymore.
>
> Besied, I thought we try to avoid select-ing symbols that can also be
> set manually. As that makes it more likely to trigger circular
> dependency problems in the kconfig tools, doesn't it?
>
> > We could make the CFG80211_WEXT help message be very negative so that
> > people aren't encouraged to select it even if they can, but then if
> > they need the ipw driver it gets selected because of that. Because the
> > ipw driver is probably the more important of the two if you just
> > happen to have old hardware but are upgrading yout software (and
> > anybody who recompiles their own kernel is obviously doing the
> > latter).
>
> Side note: am I correct in thinking that there's some successor to
> CFG80211_WEXT and that the ipw2200 driver could, at least in theory, be
> ported to that successor? (ipw2200 hardware appears to be a bit old, so
> probably no one would care enough to actually do that.)
> net/wireless/kconfig doesn't mention anything like that, so probably I'm
> just confused.

ipw2200 is a WEXT driver using some wext functionality (and struct 
wiphy) provided by cfg80211 hence it needs CFG80211_WEXT. I guess that 
is what makes it confusing.

Regards,
Arend


> Paul Bolle
>
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/