Compiling hostapd from git with libnl also from git...

[Jouni Malinen]

On Tue, Dec 09, 2008 at 11:19:58AM -0500, john dowd wrote:

> Perhaps there's something I don't understand about the release
> numbers. The library
> libnl 1.1-21 appears to be the latest released to my distro opensuse
> 11.0. (It's what I see when I go into the "yast" s/w install tool and
> check the version). I get the following errors when I link using it:
> 
> /usr/lib/libnl-genl.so: undefined reference to `__flags2str'
> /usr/lib/libnl-genl.so: undefined reference to `nl_dump_line'
> /usr/lib/libnl-genl.so: undefined reference to `nl_cache_alloc_and_fill'
> collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
> make: *** [hostapd] Error 1

How did you end up trying to link in libnl-genl.so with libnl 1.1?
hostapd Makefile should only link in libnl.so with that version.

> Can I use the git API to download the libnl version that I require?

That would be a question to libnl maintainer. Do you have a requirement
of using git for this? Would not just using the latest stable release
file (http://people.suug.ch/~tgr/libnl/files/libnl-1.1.tar.gz) be
easier?

> It's very frustrating to trace this stuff since if you do a "google"
> search on using master mode for my particular h/w I get a lot of
> information that until you really look into it, is in some cases 3
> years old and is therefore obsolete. I understood that I required the
> latest kernel being used by the wireless development team which is the
> 2.6.28-rc5 kernel. I then needed the latest hostapd 0.6.6 and the
> latest libnl from git.

At this point, the latest git snapshot comment is probably good for the
kernel and hostapd. However, it is not valid for libnl anymore. libnl
1.1 seems to work fine and it is included in many recent distributions
(e.g., I did not need to do anything specific to build hostapd on Ubuntu
8.10).

> Can you perhaps lend some clarity to my situation. If you can perhaps
> just tell me which hostapd and libnl library versions that I require
> it would be really helpful.

I would use hostapd from git and libnl from the URL I mentioned above.
If you have a requirement (the reason for which I do not understand) of
using libnl git snapshot, you may be able to do that by adding
CONFIG_LIBNL20=y into hostapd .config.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA