Removal request: madwifi, madwifi-tools

[Kel Modderman]

Hi Holger,

On Wednesday 17 September 2008 08:23:56 Holger Levsen wrote:
<snip>
> 
> 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 :-)
 
If forced between maintaining an awful snapshot of dead end crap for the
lifetime of Lenny just because I am not allowed to have it removed for what
I feel valid and compelling reasons, or getting to update the package version
(at an unsuitable time of release phase) to something that is likely to be
easily maintained for Lenny shelf life, I would probably take my chance with
a new version, even though I cannot properly test it.

However that version would (most likely) be based on 0.9.4 and not supporting
new chips, like for example the one that Rene owns, or the chips that Julien
claim to be unsupported by ath5k, because the 0.9.4 branch is the only branch
on madwifi.org that functions with some integrity, but it is based on an
old binary which dictates hardware support.

In fact I prepared an upload of 0.9.4.0 (which would supercede the current
SVN snapshot) and requested it to be uploaded but my request was ignored,
possibly because of pressure to keep a version of madwifi that supports atheros
hardware in recent mac's and eeepc hardware in the archive, I don't know.

The reaction against my proposal pisses me off, no-one comments on the other
reasons i put forward which make madwifi unsuitable for a long term stable
release, instead they just complain that there hardware won't be supported
by some non-free m-a package. They could at least offer to help out with
further action that may be needed during the Lenny lifetime or something, to
give me confidence enough to believe that the packages would be providing good
service to the users of Lenny. My last few requests few new uploads simply fell
on deaf ears, one may search the pkg-madwifi archive on alioth if they need
evidence of this.

BTW, I have pointed the kernel team toward a patch series which improves the
ath5k driver in linux 2.6.26. I also have facilitated the removal of
wpa_supplicant's specific madwifi driver wrapper some moths ago. I am not
mucking around here, if someone want to support this madwifi stuff let them
step up, it will not be me, by myself, any longer.

Kel.