Bug 100835

Summary:	pcmcia enabled by default for wirless drivers
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Daevid Vincent <daevid>
Component:	Current packages	Assignee:	Gentoo Linux bug wranglers <bug-wranglers>
Status:	RESOLVED CANTFIX
Severity:	normal
Priority:	High
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Daevid Vincent 2005-07-30 13:34:01 UTC

I have been pulling my hair out for a while after updating my kernel, I 
couldn't get my wlan0 wireless PCMCIA card to work again. I kept re-emerging 
the "net-wireless/linux-wlan-ng" but was never getting the module. 

daevid ~ # emerge -av net-wireless/linux-wlan-ng
These are the packages that I would merge, in order:
Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild  N    ] net-wireless/linux-wlan-ng-0.2.1_pre23  -build -pcmcia -usb 
437 kB 
Total size of downloads: 437 kB

Then after staring at the ebuild line I realized much to my astonishment that 
it is set to "-pcmcia". WTF?! This seems to me absurd. 90% of the wireless 
cards out there are PCMCIA. So I had to edit my /etc/portage/package.use file 
and add 'pcmcia' to it for this ebuild. I guess I never noticed or even 
considered the possibility that it would default to not building PCMCIA.

I would like to request that pcmcia be on by default for this ebuild.
This would also go for "net-wireless/hostap-driver".
"net-wireless/madwifi-driver" doesn't have this problem. It just works.

Is there some logic or reason behind them being defaulted to off for these 
that I'm just not seeing?

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. emerge -av net-wireless/linux-wlan-ng net-wireless/hostap-driver


Actual Results:  
notice you don't have a wlan0 module as you would expect

Expected Results:  
had '+pcmcia' enabled by default as 90% of all wireless CARDS are PCMCIA

This could be considered a feature request I suppose, but in my mind (and I'm 
sure the other poor suckers who had to search around and figure this out on 
their own too) it's a defect.

Comment 1 Carsten Lohrke (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2005-07-30 15:01:29 UTC

>Is there some logic or reason behind them being defaulted to off for these 
that I'm just not seeing?

There are no defaults per ebuild. They are global (profile based). You can set
the pcmcia use flag in /etc/make.conf, if you want to have it enabled for all
ebuilds.

Comment 2 Joe Stroller 2005-07-30 15:10:20 UTC

As a "specialist purveyor of guaranteed Linux-compatible wireless cards" the figure of 90% seems to me 
slightly excessive. I sell two types of Belkin card, both using the Ralink chipset (`emerge rt25000`) and  
both at the same price - over the past couple of months 40% of my orders have been for the PCMCIA (in 
fact Cardbus) model, 60% for the PCI model.