Stop shipping userspace wireless-tools tools

[Ravi Kant Sharma]

Wireless Extensions support in the kernel has been deprecated[1] for a long time now. wireless-tools[2] userspace utility should be removed. iw[3] is considered as the alternate.

related: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wireless-tools/+bug/2068612

debian-installer (and Ubiquity) have a dependency on libiw via netcfg. It unlikely that ubiquity will be removed from 24.10. Let's remove the userspace tools for 24.10.

$ reverse-depends wireless-tools
Reverse-Recommends
==================
* broadcom-sta-dkms
* hw-probe
* laptop-mode-tools
* task-laptop
* whereami

Reverse-Depends
===============
* aircrack-ng [amd64 ppc64el s390x]
* kubuntu-desktop [amd64 arm64 armhf ppc64el]
* lubuntu-desktop [amd64 arm64 armhf ppc64el s390x]
* vanilla-gnome-desktop [amd64 arm64 armhf ppc64el]

Packages without architectures listed are reverse-dependencies in: amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, s390x

[Graham Inggs (ginggs)]

What is the plan for the reverse-dependencies?

* aircrack-ng
* kubuntu-desktop
* lubuntu-desktop
* vanilla-gnome-desktop

I think they need to be fixed before we stop building the wireless-tools binary package.

[Ravi Kant Sharma (ravi-sharma)]

aircrack-ng is in -proposed.
*-desktop ones should drop dependency on rebuild.

[Aaron Rainbolt (arraybolt3)]

Lubuntu developer here, am I correct that wireless-tools should simply be swapped out for iw in the seed?

[Ravi Kant Sharma (ravi-sharma)]

Aaron, yes for userspace tools, like iwlist and iwconfig. iw provides equivalent userspace tools.

If you are dependent on a library from wireless-tools like libiw-dev, then you should not remove wireless-tools just yet. This bug only covers removing the userspace tools. There is a different bug for all of wireless-tools https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wireless-tools/+bug/2068612

[Aaron Rainbolt (arraybolt3)]

I just did an upload to lubuntu-desktop that should resolve this.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package wireless-tools - 30~pre9-17ubuntu2

---------------
wireless-tools (30~pre9-17ubuntu2) oracular; urgency=medium

  * Removing wireless-tools userspace package (LP: #2075850)

 -- Ravi Kant Sharma <email address hidden> Fri, 09 Aug 2024 12:59:03 +0200