"The wireless extensions, it seems, may be extended no more" [LWN.net]

"The wireless extensions, it seems, may be extended no more"

Posted Oct 13, 2006 2:26 UTC (Fri) by slamb (guest, #1070)
In reply to: Humor by simonl
Parent article: The final wireless extension?

It's good writing, but I don't think it's actually true. Couldn't the existing version number be frozen
at 20 and a "real" version number added as another ioctl()? The behavior on unknown ioctl()s is
well-defined, so there'd be a reliable way to know if the API was extended in a different way than
originally planned for version 21.

This would make the check-for-21-or-higher tools think it's 20, yet newly written tools know
it's something else. They could even negotiate a version to use.

it's an ugly solution and perhaps not worthwhile, but it's possible.

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