Removal of wireless-applets from gnome-applets?

[Pat Suwalski <pat suwalski net>]

Hello,

As of recent releases of gnome-applets, the wireless applet has been 
removed.

I very much used and liked the wireless-applet and I'm curious if 
there's some sort of module removal policy with these things. For 
example, does an applet need to cover all the functionality of an old 
applet before getting removed? If there were an applet that behaved 
pretty much the same way as the old one, I would be inclined to switch 
to it.

However, the immediate replacement, netstatus, does not do everything as 
well as the w-a. For example, it does not seem to be able to show my 
signal strength as a percentage, does not tell me how strong my signal 
is via a colour cue, and has very annoying (distracting) flashing 
monitors consuming valuable applet space. It seems to take away 
everything that made wireless-applet better than all the others.

The main reason I was given for this change is that wireless-applet's 
code is messy. To me, the copy in CVS looks short and simple. I also 
cannot imagine it being a big deal to maintain.

So, is there any reason why it should be removed before a proper 
replacement is available? I cannot see netstatus gaining all this 
missing functionality within the timeframe of the next release. I would 
love to see w-a in Gnome 2.10.

--Pat