[elrepo] [elrepo-devel] Broken kmod-compat-wireless package

[Phil Perry]

On 09/08/12 19:55, Michael Lampe wrote:
> Phil Perry wrote:
>
>> We've had a number of reports of the compat-wireless package being
>> broken on EL 6.3.
>
> Hi Phil,
>
>> I've now had time to spend a couple days looking into this so wanted to
>> take the opportunity to update where we are on this and decide if it's
>> worth pursuing.
>
> I have also spent some time with this, but most probably less than you.
>
>> So where does this leave us?
>
> My personal opinion is that it is not worth the effort anymore. Current
> EL6 kernels are so special that it will now be a major effort to come up
> with a working kmod-compat-wireless. Even such things as constants
> (#define ...) differ from mainstream now. This needs real insight (I
> guess) and is beyond me at least.
>
> The same guy that made work compat-wireless-3.2 with EL6 kernels has
> done the backport, it seems. So let him decide/do.
>
> My vote is to drop this package.
>
> One final "idea" perhaps: It might be possible to still build this
> package against the 6.2 kernel by renaming all symbols that now clash in
> 6.3 and count on the kernel ABI.
>
> Regards,
> Michael
>
>

Hi Michael,

I'm making some progress on this now. I emailed the compat-wireless 
project and some more patches have been submitted to help fix the latest 
branch. If I'm going to spend more time on it then it really makes sense 
to work on the latest branch rather than our old 3.3.2 snapshot.

I've applied these to the 3.5-3 snapshot, and although it still doesn't 
compile cleanly, I feel I'm getting closer. I'm going to continue 
bashing away at it for another day or so to see if I can get something 
out of it.

In the long term things don't look brilliant though. One thing is for 
sure, things are very likely to break on RHEL for each minor update 
release so whilst things will be good for a few months if we get it 
working again, expect a similar effort when 6.4 hits the streets.