problem compiling Hostap against the latest libnl... (prototypes don't match)

[Pavel Roskin]

On Sun, 2010-02-21 at 22:31 +0100, Frantisek Rysanek wrote:

> > Do you have any particular reason for using the current snapshot of
> > libnl instead of a proper release? 
> >
> reason #1: there doesn't seem to be a proper release. The homepage of 
> libnl refers me to the GIT repo. There don't seem to be any releases,
> just an older development snapshot called 1.0-pre6. I've seen 1.1 
> mentioned in some README or .config, but such a tarball or GIT tag is 
> nowhere to be found... The snapshot that I'm using is two months old -
>  doesn't sound like a road under construction, maybe it's as close to 
> the "latest release" as it gets :-)

The libnl download page is a mess.  The 1.1 release does exist in the
wild, but not on the libnl page.  There is also a commit in the libnl
git repository called "1.1 release", although it's not tagged.

I'll try to contact the maintainer of libnl and ask to clean up all that
mess.

> I didn't go into such detail as to dissect how much the version (age) 
> of libnl has to match the latest developments of the nl80211 - 
> whether there are some shared headers that are evolving quickly, 
> or if perhaps the libnl is just a thin generic "access shim" to the 
> nl80211, and thus the recent developments in nl80211 (kernel space) 
> don't really require the latest libnl (user-space library)...

If you look for references to CONFIG_LIBNL20 in the sources for
wpa_supplicant and hostapd, you'll see that there is absolutely no new
functionality enabled when CONFIG_LIBNL20 is defined.

> I was wondering if I should just use the "wext" driver, instead of 
> "nl802.11". The "wext" interface should be stable. I just have some 
> doubt how long that interface to Linux Wireless will stay fully 
> functional (before it gets stale / broken).

If you want to "future-proof" your distro so badly that you resort to
git snapshots of libraries, you should really use nl80211 whenever
possible.  wext is in process of being obsoleted.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin