On 12/31/14 15:07, Jiri Kosina wrote:

On Wed, 31 Dec 2014, Arend van Spriel wrote:

quoted

The thing with WEXT is that it will stay as is. So if tools like wicd
want to support new features like P2P it will need to make the switch. I
checked out wicd repo and found a number of iwconfig calls and they kick
off wpa_supplicant with wext driver.

Unfortunately this is by no means just about wicd. I have already received
a few off-list mails from people who were wondering why their home-made
scripts / tools, which are running 'iwconfig' directly suddenly stopped to
work, and that it was indeed fallout of WEXT going away. Given the very
short time this has been in mainline, you can probably imagine the
fireworks once this appears in major release.

It is unfortunately indeed. I think iwconfig and friends will never go 
away although iw is a better alternative, simply because people don't 
like to change their home-made scripts/tools. WIRELESS_EXT actually is 
largely, but not entirely, gone in upstream drivers and what we are 
talking about here is CFG80211_WEXT which allows WEXT userspace to 
interact with cfg80211-based drivers through a compatibility layer.

Regards,
Arend