[OE-core] iw in place of wireless-tools

[Christopher Larson]

On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 2:05 PM, Chris Larson <clarson at kergoth.com> wrote:

> On Friday, January 31, 2014, Nicolas Dechesne <nicolas.dechesne at linaro.org>
> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 8:01 PM, Iorga, Cristian
>> <cristian.iorga at intel.com> wrote:
>> > On my Ubuntu 13.10 dev machine, wireless-tools and iw are both
>> installed by
>> > default (I might be wrong here, maybe I installed them some time ago by
>> > hand).
>>
>> you are right, they are both on the default install, see
>>
>> http://releases.ubuntu.com/13.10/ubuntu-13.10-desktop-amd64.manifest
>
>
> For what its worth, I personally would love to see wireless-tools go away
> in favor of iw, much as ifconfig has gone to the wayside in favor of
> iputils.
>

Bringing this back up again, as I think we really need to at the *very*
least pull in iw from meta-oe into oe-core, and adjust packagegroup-base
(worst case, with a VIRTUAL-RUNTIME), and better yet also drop
wireless-tools / move it to meta-networking.

>From the debian /usr/share/doc/iw/README.Debian:

    Why is wireless-tools being replaced?
    =====================================

    A complete summary of technical reasons for the abandonment of Linux
Wireless
    Extensions API is documented on the wireless.kernel.org wiki page for
WEXT [3].

    In brief, WEXT uses ioctl's as the kernel<->userspace communication
mechanism,
    but some developers wish to have a more structured transport mechanism,
which
    cfg80211 and nl80211 provide, to allow them to address old nagging
problems
    with the current wireless device configuration implementation, and give
them
    more freedom to enhance the process of wireless configuration [4].

    WEXT is in deep maintenance mode, cfg80211 and nl80211 are the
communication
    transport mechanism of the future.

    [3]
http://wireless.kernel.org/en/developers/Documentation/Wireless-Extensions
    [4] which is one of the areas which, in my opinion, has always been
difficult
        for new adopters on Linux, especially on the desktop.

Also:

    https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/Documentation/iw indicates
"The old tool iwconfing, which uses Wireless Extensions interface, is
deprecated and it's strongly recommended to switch to iw and nl80211."
-- 
Christopher Larson
clarson at kergoth dot com
Founder - BitBake, OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus
Maintainer - Tslib
Senior Software Engineer, Mentor Graphics
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