Re: Proposal: remove support for non-scanning wireless drivers in 0.7?

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2006-12-11 at 23:15 -0500, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-12-11 at 22:16 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Would anyone be terribly offended if support for non-scanning drivers
> > got removed for the next major version of NetworkManager?  I can't think
> > of any driver of consequence [1] right now that doesn't support
> > scanning, since Orinoco got scanning upstream in the kernel around
> > 2.6.12.  I think we can expect any wireless card and driver you put into
> > a modern Linux system to support wireless scanning.  The benefits are
> > removal of a bunch of code and cleanups of the logic inside
> > NetworkManager for scanning and connection handling.
> 
> If I understand you correctly, you would like to remove from NM all
> "extra" code that exists to support wireless scanning, via direct driver
> interrogation, leaving only core code that relies on kernel
> functionality.  If so, that makes sense to me.  I would support that.

Almost.  Most of the direct WEXT scanning code is already gone, and
replace by queries to wpa_supplicant.

What I'm talking about here is the special handling code for cards that
don't support wireless scanning at all.  It was initially written
specifically for the Orinoco driver, which didn't support scanning until
2.6.13 or something.  The code works around the fact that Orinoco didn't
support scanning by copying the entire "allowed" list of access points
to the scan list, and by not autoconnecting to any access point, but
waiting for the user to request a connection, and not requesting or
converting scan results.

Dan

> -Jim P.
>