Atheros hostapd changes

[Jouni Malinen]

On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 10:38:53PM -0700, Ted Merrill wrote:

> I've been asked to push back changes that Atheros has made to hostapd and is
> using internally and passing on to customers.

That's nice to hear! This type of contributions are very welcome. One
thing to keep in mind here is that I do expect all the proposed changes
to be licensed under a compatible license; preferably the same
dual-GPL/BSD combination that hostapd is licensed under. Please let me
know if there are any questions about this.

> I'll try to push back the changes in separate pieces, beginning with the least 
> dangerous changes and then working towards the biggest change of all, which 
> is the addition of a hook for a WPS server.
> The architecture for the WPS server is that a localhost port is used to pass 
> information to and from a separate program that implements the server.

Is this WPS server available as an open source program? Based on another
message from you, this seems to be referring to the Intel
implementation. Would that work as-is or are changes needed for it, too?

I haven't looked into the current state of the Intel implementation, but
the original design was not very suitable for integration into hostapd
for number of reasons. One issue can be resolved by following the current
development tree for hostapd (i.e., I have no plans of adding this type
of new functionality into old branches). The other main problems were in
the way the communication to an external process was done (it must not
block hostapd) and how the EAP integration was done (it must use
expanded EAP headers properly since that is now supported in hostapd).

> I understand that "git" is being used, and have cloned a git repository... but 
> what action should i take to push back or to have pulled back the changes i 
> commit? (Take in account i've never used git before today).

I use a git repository internally to maintain the official releases and
make the repository publicly available. You are free to use whatever
mechanism you want yourself for doing the development, but I would
prefer to receive proposed changes as separate patch files (i.e., not
git push or a request to pull from another git repository). You can
generate patches with git, but you may find tools like quilt to be more
suitable for this purposes (that's the tool I use to maintain patches
that I submit to other projects that use git).

> Anyone else working on WPS server hooks (or WPS server integrated into 
> hostapd)?

I've heard of multiple WPS implementations that are using hostapd.
However, I'm currently aware of only one additional project that I would
categories as something that has reasonable likelyhood of releasing
anything under an open source license at some point. As far as closed
implementations are concerned, I would just ignore them. As far as other
possible open source work on this area is concerned, I would hope that
people involved with them would comment on the topic if they have plans
on releasing something in near future.

I'm not aware of any details for various projects on this area, so I
cannot provide much more information here. Anyway, as far as getting
something into the mainline hostapd releases is concerned, posting to
this mailing list is the best way of moving things forward.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA