[Madwifi-devel] Re: How to compile hostapd-0.4.6 and wpa_supplicant-0.4.6 for madwifi-ng (1314)

[Jouni Malinen]

On Sat, Nov 12, 2005 at 07:23:45PM +1000, Kel Modderman wrote:

> However, this method has a distinct disadvantage for binary 
> distributions; a new wpasupplicant that works with madwifi-ng will not 
> be backwards compatible with users still happy with the old madwifi, as 
> it seems that you will support one or the other but not both at once.

Just to make sure it was understood that this is in no way limited to
"this method" since all the patches I've seen has the same property.

> Is it too much of a burden on you to support multiple madwifi versions 
> at once?

It would be somewhat complex. One could either create two separate
driver interfaces in wpa_supplicant (e.g., driver_madwifi.c and
driver_madwifi_ng.c) which is something that I was considering to do
first. However, since the madwifi drivers use the exact same include
file names, the build system would need to be modified to point at
different directories for these two set of files.

Alternatively, one could create copy of all the needed structures from
both versions and create private set of header files with both
structures included and then decide on run time which one to use.
Obviously, this would be quite a bit of extra work. If the driver
interfaces were expected to be relatively static, I could consider doing
this, but I don't that this would be the case for madwifi-ng, so I'm
unlikely to be interested in following up with changes in the header
files and synchorizing the private, merged copy of the structures with
that all the time.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA