Hi,
I thought about filing another bug about this, but decided I'd rather
whine about it in public to get a better airing / flaming /
understanding of the issues.
Using a wireless network card under linux may require various
components:
- the hardware driver itself
- a firmware to be uploaded to the card via hotplug
- hotplug
- as I understand it: wireless-tools to actually configure the SSID,
WEP key
&c of the wireless network to be connected to.
Is my understanding of the last point incorrect?
Because it seems to me there's little point in emerging the ebuild for
a wireless network card unless it's going to be connected to a wireless
network, and in that case the least thing that's going to need setting
is the SSID & IP address.
Prism54 is the name of one such driver, and because it is being
incorporated into the main kernel tree there exists more than one
ebuild for it - one which includes the hardware driver module itself,
and one for one for users of the latest kernels who only require the
firmware.
These two ebuilds take a different approach to wireless-tools - one
requires it as a depend, the other does not:
$ emerge -pv prism54
These are the packages that I would merge, in order:
Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild N ] sys-apps/hotplug-20040923 43 kB
[ebuild N ] net-wireless/prism54-firmware-1.0.4.3 91 kB
[ebuild N ] net-wireless/wireless-tools-27 +nls 0 kB
[ebuild N ] net-wireless/prism54-20050125 -pcmcia 74 kB
Total size of downloads: 210 kB
$ emerge -pv prism54-firmware
These are the packages that I would merge, in order:
Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild N ] sys-apps/hotplug-20040923 43 kB
[ebuild N ] net-wireless/prism54-firmware-1.0.4.3 91 kB
Total size of downloads: 135 kB
$
I filed a bug <http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=87197> about this
a few weeks ago, and was told:
"The firmware itself does not depend on wireless-tools for operation.
DEPEND/RDEPEND/PDEPEND in ebuilds are not for what you might
want to use along with the package in question - it is for technical
dependencies such as libraries and utilities."
Now, as I say, I can see few reasons to install the prism54 firmware &
not use wireless-tools - were you to use a Prism54 card in passive-mode
as a packet-sniffer then I suppose it's possible, but most users want
to `emerge prism54-firmware` and have it "Just Work (tm)".
Having been blown out on my bug I took it deeply personally, then
shrugged & forgot about it. Forgot about it, that is, until I went to
setup the wireless card in a freshly-installed laptop today:
$ emerge -pv acx100
These are the packages that I would merge, in order:
Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild N ] net-wireless/wireless-tools-27 +nls 0 kB
[ebuild N ] net-wireless/acx100-0.2.0_pre8-r5 -pcmcia 275 kB
Total size of downloads: 275 kB
$
It seems to me that I could now file a bug about acx100 saying that it
"incorrectly depends upon wireless-tools" but - unless I'm
misunderstanding something pertinent - I still think this is the wrong
behaviour. Whether I'm installing a prism54 or an acx100 card in my
machine, I'm still going to need to iwconfig them to the right wireless
network.
The ebuild for the Ralink cards seems to feel the same way:
$ emerge -pv rt2500
These are the packages that I would merge, in order:
Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild N ] net-wireless/wireless-tools-27 +nls 0 kB
[ebuild N ] net-wireless/rt2500-1.1.0_beta2-r1 +qt 286 kB
Total size of downloads: 286 kB
$
So, anyway, I don't intend for this posting to be a criticism of brix
for blowing me out on my bug, I just want to understand better. Can
anyone tell me if there's a logical reason for wireless-tools to be
treated differently by these 4 packages? If you "might want to use"
wireless-tools in almost every circumstance with the prism54-firmware &
this isn't covered by DEPEND/RDEPEND/PDEPEND, can we have a new
variable "YOU_MIGHT_WANT_TO_USE_DEPEND", please?
Stroller.
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