Comment 116 for bug 732677

Chris, ok, I'm glad we're on the same page now.

My question now is whether this bug is obsolete. This bug was filed about version 5.100.82.38 of the driver. That's no longer the current version of the driver.

In Saucy we have:
bcmwl = 6.30.223.30+bdcom-0ubuntu1
broadcom-sta = 5.100.82.112-11

In Raring we have:
bcmwl = 6.20.155.1+bdcom-0ubuntu6
broadcom-sta = 5.100.82.112-9

And in Precise we have:
bcmwl = 6.20.155.1+bdcom-0ubuntu0.0.1
broadcom-sta = 5.100.82.112-4

And then there's the in-tree driver, which for at least some cards makes those packages obsolete, at least on some kernel versions.

It seems to me that it still boils down to Ubuntu needing to install the proper driver. For example, if broadcom-sta_ 5.100.82.112-9 said it supported BCM4313, but BCM4313 worked with the in-tree driver, broadcom-sta shouldn't even be installed, regardless of whether BCM4313 worked with broadcom-sta. Or if a 5.100.82.38 of some package didn't work, but the newer version did, that should be fixed by the newer version.

Now if there are some versions of some driver packages that don't properly work with some cards, that could result in two problems:

1. Users upgrading distro versions with a package could end up with a version of the package that doesn't work anymore (that happened to me). That's still a matter of Ubuntu choosing the correct package.

2. Users trying to manually choose a package, searching package descriptions, and choosing a package that happens to not work with their card. That's unfortunate and frustrating. But the only way to solve this is to comprehensively test all these different versions of all these different packages with all the different cards they claim to support, some of which might have subtle bugs with certain cards, and some of which seem to have regressions in newer versions.

So if you want this bug to be #2...well, ok, I guess I can't argue with that. But I'm not sure it's practical to really solve it. I think the best we can realistically hope for is to get Ubuntu automatically choosing the right package on first install and hopefully on distro upgrade. And probably the only way we can do that is to act on specific reports of specific cards failing with specific versions of specific driver packages.

Maybe the best thing for now would be to make a note in all driver packages that there are multiple driver packages that support the same cards, and if one package doesn't work, the user should try the others (including the in-tree one, which requires uninstalling the driver packages). I think that there are just too many combinations to be proactively comprehensive. With all the versions and packages and claimed-supported cards, there ends up being something like 432 combinations.

I think all of this came about because Broadcom broke support for older cards when they released the 6.20.x drivers. Maybe it was an accident, or maybe they forgot to note that older cards were no longer supported by newer releases. Whatever happened, it sure has made a mess!

Anyway, I feel like I may be more confused now than I was before. I'm going to mark this bug as Incomplete in the Ubuntu project and let you take this bug from here. :) My only suggestion is to try to give it a more helpful title; what it has now may be either too specific or not specific enough.