[PATCH] Allow wpa_supplicant to use libnl-2.0

[Jouni Malinen]

On Thu, Jul 02, 2009 at 11:21:21AM -0500, Jon Loeliger wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-07-02 at 18:40 +0300, Jouni Malinen wrote:
> > Thanks. I don't think libnl 2.0 has been released
> 
> As far as I know, it has not yet been officially released.
> The libnl 1.1 release, though, was about 18 months ago.
> I'm hoping we've made some improvements in the library since then! :-)

Maybe there have been improvements, but I'm not aware of issues in the
latest release either.

> > and the snapshot
> > versions after 1.1 are known to have changed the API in incompatible
> > ways,
> 
> So, hostapd, though it has the options in its build, doesn't work?

I have not checked whether it builds against the current libnl snapshot
since it is too much of a moving target with incompatible API changes
and no easy version etc. defines that could be used to automatically fix
the application builds. It used to be possible to build hostapd against
a libnl snapshot at the time when the forward compatibility code was
added into driver_nl80211.c.

> >  so I do not have much interest in tracking this before a real
> > release is available.
> 
> Sorry, but this reads strangely to me.  It sounds to me like
> you (we) are not interested in doing development work towards
> the next release so that it might be ready when that release
> happens.  Is that right?

As long as a library keeps changing its API in ways that are not even
trying to be backwards compatible, does not provide any defines to
allow this to be handled cleanly, and the author does not reply to
questions and suggestions to improve this situation, then yes, I'm not
very interested in doing the development work before the next release
is available or at least there is reasonable expectation on the new API
being frozen for 2.0 release.

> OK, so this was very confusing to me.  Yes, I've seen the
> release graph on w1.fi, and I've browsed the two hostap.git
> and hostap-06.git code bases.  Because the 6.8 and 6.9 tags
> are not present in the hostap.git repo, I incorrectly decided
> that hostap.git was lagging behind the hostap-06.git.
> 
> If hostap.git is the current development head, I'll rebase
> my patch for that repo!

Naming used here may not be clear enough if you have not been following
the development process in the past, but yes, hostap.git is indeed the
development branch and continues to be that. hostap-*.git will be stable
branches which will be created more or less when a stable release is
created. Stable release updates like 0.6.8 and 0.6.9 are only available
from the stable branches, not from the main development repository.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA