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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