On Fri, Jan 3, 2025, at 13:44, Johannes Berg wrote:

On Fri, 2025-01-03 at 07:44 +0100, Philipp Hortmann wrote:

quoted

One of my big fears is the hand over to the next generation maintainers 
and developers. The less code and the less exceptions due to old 
interfaces the easier it will be. We loose maintainers and developers 
for many reasons, like: retirement, burnout, embargos or simply because 
they are not paid and need to earn money. After giving some support on 
the staging subsystem I cannot see at all that we can attract so many 
talented people as required for a save future beyond 7 years...

I wouldn't say that's necessarily a wrong sentiment, but I feel future
maintainers can also make that decision, and if it's "years" in the
future the relevance will only go down anyway.

We just started putting some pressure into the system for removal of
wext and nl80211 support (with WiFi7 devices no longer supporting wext)
so chances are at least here the situation will change, and anyway wext
stuff will become less relevant, perhaps to the point that other tools
will drop support for it anyway. Not wpa_supplicant though, I suppose :)

I would assume that once removing CFG80211_WEXT becomes an option, we
can just put the remaining parts of net/wireless/wext-*.c into both
ps3_gelic and ipw2x00, duplicating and then simplifying the
implementation. As far as I can tell, there is very little that is
actually shared between the two anyway.

     Arnd