Removal request: madwifi, madwifi-tools

[Kel Modderman]

Hi Holger,

On Wednesday 17 September 2008 22:21:38 Holger Levsen wrote:
> > This is annoying as he does not see my responses. I 
> > also do not think he holds any relevance to this discussion, I am sure he
> > could not give two hoots what decisions Debian is making, he is a very busy
> > person.
> 
> True, but he also wants his codebase to be used (and help people using their 
> hardware) :-)

So let me put this into the context of Lenny. If we are to adopt Felix codebase
the following facts are true (correct me if wrong):

* we must revert to a snapshot of madwifi.org trunk at svn revsion 3314,
  madwifi.org trunk is at revision 3856, the package in Lenny is based
  on a branch of revision 3772. This means discarding a few hundred commits
  to some point in time when the fork was taken.
* we must apply all patches:
  https://dev.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/trac.fcgi/browser/trunk/package/madwifi/patches
  that's a lot of patches! who has reviewed them? who has tested them?
* we must trust a binary HAL that was only announced to the public on the
  16th of September 2008 by Scott Raynel, who announced it because Felix
  couldn't really be bothered.

I do not like the idea for _Lenny_. I do not like that this is a fork of the
existing project. It indicate that Felix does _not_ want to put effort into
supporting madwifi (which is not just users of it, but developers of it too),
he only has time to put effort into Felix version of madwifi, which is
primarily targetted at users of embedded devices and primarily serves the
needs of Felix and his clients.

Please note I have no reason not to trust Felix and I believe him to
be a good person, but this kind of plan is totally insane for the Lenny
timeframe, and doesn't change the fact that the current snapshot of
madwifi in Lenny is unsuitable for release, in my opinion. I also seriously
fear the madwifi project is terminally ill and may suffer a death that
leave everybody in the cold RSN.

Thanks, Kel.