Bug#986881: iw: Incorporate useful bits of crda?

[Georg Müller]

On Mon, 1 Nov 2021 15:13:50 +0100 Paride Legovini  wrote:

Control: reassign -1 wireless-regdb

Thanks for this detailed and informative bug report. I think the udev
rule belongs to wireless-regdb, as the rule isn't really useful without
the regulatory db, and I don't think we want to make iw Recommend
wireless-regdb. If wireless-regdb adopts the rule then it should at
least Recommend iw, which I think makes sense.

I'm reassigning this bug to wireless-regdb, but I'm open for further
discussion.

Cheers,

Paride


Is there any progress on this? Now that debian begins stabilizing bookworm
release, there is no setregdomain mechanism included.

Fedora has a nice udev script which - if no country is set explicitly - sets
the regulatory domain from the configured time zone:

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/wireless-regdb/blob/rawhide/f/setregdomain

If there should not be a hard dependency on iw, this might need a separate check
or a warning...

Best regards,
Georg

Bug#986881: iw: Incorporate useful bits of crda?

[Diederik de Haas]

Package: iw
Version: 5.9-3
Severity: wishlist
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-kernel@lists.debian.org

Earlier I filed bug #972994 to remove the Recommends on crda, which was
then fixed, thanks.
Today I got an update of network-manager which fixed bug #973241 for
which the request and fix was similar to #972994.
In that bug Ben Hutchings got looped in, hence debian-kernel ML in CC,
in which Ben said the following:

"I think you can safely drop it for bullseye.  In addition to crda
itself, the package also contains a udev rule for setting the
regulatory domain that may still be useful, but it is not generally
needed."

I also found bug #920740 titled "Should crda be shipped in buster?"
I think it was still needed for Buster, but questionable wrt Bullseye. 
I also noticed that crda's homepage gives a 404.

I don't really know/understand how/what/when crda did that could still
be useful/needed, but Ben's comment indicates that at least the udev
rule may still be useful. Looking into crda's package I found
/etc/default/crda with which you can set a default regulatory domain.
And in /lib/crda/setregdomain it uses that file/value to call 
'iw reg set ""'. The udev rule calls the crda binary btw, so I
don't know if 'setregdomain' is actually called.


This bug is basically to ensure that the useful part of crda doesn't get
lost. I'm assuming that the maintainers who'll read this bug can
determine if/what/how/where the useful part should be preserved.
Maybe the 'wireless-regdb' package is more appropriate, if so feel free 
to reassign. And if nothing needs to be preserved, you can close it.
I filed it against the 'iw' package as I saw the 'iw reg set' call and
'wireless-regdb' doesn't (yet?) have a dependency on 'iw'.

Cheers,
  Diederik

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 11.0
  APT prefers unstable-debug
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'testing-debug'), (500, 
'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (101, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-6-amd64 (SMP w/16 CPU threads)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages iw depends on:
ii  libc6 2.31-11
ii  libnl-3-200   3.4.0-1+b1
ii  libnl-genl-3-200  3.4.0-1+b1

Versions of packages iw recommends:
ii  wireless-regdb  2020.04.29-2

iw suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information