The madwifi project recently depreciated all thier old code which depreciates all the currently available ebuilds for madwifi in portage. New ebuilds for the updated codebase now provides code from both the merged bsd tree and contributions directly from atheros. Madwifi tools were integrated also integrated into the same subversion repo as the drivers. New ebvuilds would most likely close any existing madwifi bugs.
Yes, your request is valid .. but many users really need the wpa-feature which does not yet work with our current wpa-suppliant version. Thus madwifi is masked at the moment. But I believe brix is working on it, you can find some work in his overlay on dev.gentoo.org/~brix Till it is ready I will close ths bug
