# CONFIG_CFG80211_WEXT: should it be honoured?

## Joseph K.

I'm not sure how unusual this is, but on my laptop I don't have CONFIG_CFG80211_WEXT set.  However, ebuilds of various wireless tools that depend on WEXT will emerge without blinking an eye.  My question is: should they?  I know there are plenty of other ebuilds that will fail to emerge if their required kernel config settings aren't there.  Is there a "best practice" in Gentoo for this kind of thing?

The basic annoyance that it would be nice to avoid is emerging software that doesn't function.  It's not even clear most of the time why it doesn't function, as a lot of wireless tools just assume that WEXT is set.  

I'm interested to hear the thoughts of others.  Cheers.

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## NeddySeagoon

Joseph K.

There has been a lot of debate about this sort of thing recenlty on the -dev mailing list.

The problem is, which kernel should the ebuild check against?

The running kernel, the kernel at /usr/src/linux or some other random kernel the user may not have configured yet ?

The consensus that emerged was that ebuilds could check and warn but not fail.

Its OK to fix/build the kernel after the emerge.

Gentoo users are systasmins too and sysadmins are supposed to know what they are doing.

Note that the running kernel and the kernel at /usr/src/linux need not be the same thing. Even if they are, they need not share a common configuration.

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## cach0rr0

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> 
> 
> The consensus that emerged was that ebuilds could check and warn but not fail.
> 
> 

 

im still in the "make it configurable" camp. i think that may be a losing position for me however. 

with a default of what will give the desired result for 90% of the install base, and an override for the more esoteric cases where one is building a package for other than their active/symlinked kernel

even if the situation were reversed, and the default were to warn, just having the ability to change a setting that would make it error instead of warn would be nice.

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## NeddySeagoon

cach0rr0,

You want the I_KNOW_WHAT_I'M_DOING option in make.conf   :)

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