Hi.

p0g0 wrote:
> than madwifi-ng, but as before, it appears Atheros expects the FOSS
> community to rework and support that code with only marginal support.

I disagree. From what I can tell by looking at ath9k-devel it actually
seems that most of the work that's been spent on ath9k since it has been
published was done by Atheros developers.

> * I'd argue also, that the team and the end-users have suffered from
> the closed door policy now employed by the team. [...]
> However, I think it better yet that all the -team stuff migrates to
> -devel, and that all of you make an effort to quit with the
> convenience of secrecy, and instead, be entirely and immediately open
> in all things madwifi and ath5/9k. [...]

Let me explain for those who don't know:

We have a non-public mailing list, madwifi-team (or just "-team"). It was
established originally to allow private conversation of the team with
companies that preferred not to hold such conversation in the public.
Atheros was one of those companies, but we were and still are in contact
with other companies, too.
Over time, that list was used more and more to coordinate the team and
hold team-related discussions. At some point we realized that this
development is counterproductive, but it still happens that discussions
are misplaced there - for example this discussion was started on -team
first.

Now for your suggestion:

I agree that our communication must become open again. However, I disagree
about the "migrate madwifi-team to madwifi-devel" part.
I'm aware that in the past we had project-related discussions here in
madwifi-devel. Back then it was more or less ok, since we took care of
only one driver. But things have changed since, we now also have ath5k and
ath9k - does that mean we should CC all project-related discussions to
ath5k-devel and ath9k-devel, too?

The {madwifi,ath5k,ath9k}-devel lists are intended for developer
discussion about the corresponding driver, thus discussions about
administrative topics on project level are off-topic there. We should have
a dedicated mailing list for that, and in fact setting up such a list has
been on my to-do-list for two or three months now. The reason why I have
not set it up yet basically is the trouble we had (and still have) in
terms of the madwifi.org domain:

I don't want to add the list over at Sourceforge, but on our own server.
The list is about the project, so basing it on the main project domain
(madwifi.org) is the natural choice. But the availability of this domain
decreased notably during this year due to issues with the authoritative
DNS servers; I don't want to elaborate more on that at this time, but will
do so in a separate thread soon. We were already working on finding a
solution for the domain trouble, so I decided to suspend the "add new
mailing list" task for a bit.

It took longer than I originally expected, but we now have a solution; it
just needs to be implemented, which will happen during the next days. Once
this is done I will create a new public mailing list that will be used as
public replacement for the private madwifi-team list.

(Sorry for being a bit cryptic about the nature of the mentioned solution
and timeframe for its implementation - I think people will understand when
they read the announcement I will send once the implementation is
finished)

Bye, Mike

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