Removal request: madwifi, madwifi-tools

[Holger Levsen]

Hi,

I wondered on IRC today if I should suggest to update the madwifi package to 
the a new upstream version... 

Luk then asked me to send something to the list, so here is something.

On August 29th 2008 a new hal was released (a hal is the binary blob which 
controls low level functions on madwifi/atheros wlan chips), which has seen 
lots of fixes by one of the openwrt developers Felix Fietkau (who actively 
and legally maintains this hal codebase and is bcc:ed). He also maintains the 
openwrt madwifi package.

See http://madwifi.org/wiki/news/20080829/new-hal-release-for-atheros-hardware
for a joint press release with OpenWrt.org, see 
https://svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/trunk/package/madwifi for the openwrt madwifi 
code. 

Felix, please comment. FYI: this thread (where the current maintainer suggests 
the removal of madwifi-source from lenny due to it's brokeness in the current 
version) starts at 
http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2008/09/msg00709.html

As said, this codebase is considered "finished" on part of its maintainers 
(the future is clearly ath5k), which plan to only fix important bugs on it, 
which would probably be suitable for Debian stable updates too.

http://madwifi.org/wiki/news/20080829/new-hal-release-for-atheros-hardware

Ath5k is not as mature as madwifi yet, so removal is IMHO not a painless 
solution. It's reminds me of of the new JuJu firewire stack: it will be 
better, but ain't today. One important regression in ath5k in .26 is 
(missing) AP mode and there are other featues missing as well.

If the release team would allow this route, we'd need to discuss who will do 
the work (Felix, it would be great if you could release a tarball ;-), but 
that only makes sense, if you don't vote for the removal route ;-)

Kel, and other madwifi maintainers, please also comment on this. (I guess the 
release team might want to wait for this too :-)


regards,
	Holger, who knows it's a bit crazy to not only suggest a new upstream 
version, but a new upstream fork. But then, it's a optional non-free package 
only anyway. And this branch is very well maintained and widely used and so I 
think this is definitly a lot better than what is in lenny now... 
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