Patch to split roaming out of wpa_supplicant

[Jouni Malinen]

On Wed, Oct 06, 2010 at 10:56:01AM -0700, Blaise Gassend wrote:
> The key question remains, however. Would the hooks that allow people
> writing their own roaming code to be notified of events that concern
> roaming be considered for inclusion, or is there no interest? If the
> answer is yes then I am willing to work to get a patch that people
> find acceptable. But if a priori the answer is no, then there is no
> point in my wasting time getting the patch into presentable form.

This is somewhat of a difficult question to answer without seeing the
patch first, so you may not get a clear yes/no answer to that before
such a patch exist.. ;-)

There has been interest in making it easier to extend wpa_supplicant
operations in this area, so I think it would be fair to say there is
some interest.

> These hooks are calls from wpa_supplicant to an external roaming code.
> They allow somebody who wants to write their own roaming code to be
> notified of events in wpa_supplicant. They are used by wpa_supplicant
> to notify the roaming code that an important event has happened.

> There are already similar hooks for the dbus API, but they don't do
> everything that is needed for an agressive roaming strategy. For
> instance, it looks like dbus is notified when a scan succeeds, but not
> when a scan fails. If you are writing an aggressive roaming strategy,
> you need to be able to trigger a scan on a few frequencies and know
> immediately if it fails so that you can potentially try some more
> frequencies. (Trying all frequencies at once might not be a good idea
> if you know that some frequencies aren't in use and don't want to wait
> 5 seconds.) As another example, there are currently many places where
> association fails but is never reported over dbus.

I cannot really say that I have taken a closer look at the hooks you are
using (is there a patch file somewhere showing those without having to
go through a svn repository of files?), but I would expect that an
easier first step in getting this included would have indeed been to
extend D-Bus or wpa_cli interface (you mentioned that in the previous
message).

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA