ndisgen intended to be the only way to generate ndis?

[Fabian Keil]

Hi all,

as you probably have noticed, the amount of mails about
problems with compiling ndis has increased in the last
four weeks.

The "old" way to compile ndis was to go to 
/usr/src/sys/modules/if_ndis/, use ndiscvt to create a header
file containing the windows driver and to make;make install.    

It was fast and well documented in the handbook and on
the web in general.

Later Bill Paul wrote /usr/sbin/ndisgen to automate these steps.

ndisgen is an interactive shell script, it is user friendly
and describes what it's doing. However, using it is slower
than the "old" way was. You can't use shell auto completion to
specify the location of the drivers sys and inf files, some
steps are done, even if they aren't needed each time you
recompile ndis.

ATM the existence of ndisgen is poorly documented.
It's not mentioned in the handbook, not in the man pages
and seldom appears on other websites. If you don't read
the mailing lists or the cvs logs, you probably won't know
about it.  

For a while the "new" and the "old" way coexisted, everybody
was happy. Since perhaps four weeks, the "old" way stopped working
for many (all?) people. You can still build and kldload the
needed modules without error, but they will not work.

Most of the time (every time?) ndisgen still does.

AFAIK, nobody has announced that the "old" way is death,
therefore I would like to know if the breakage is intentional
and if it is, if there's a technical reason why these methods
can no longer coexists. 

Mark A-J. Raught wrote on freebsd-mobile yesterday: 
"I prefer the old way, but as long as it works I'll suffer
through the wizard feel."

So do I, I guess we're not alone.

Fabian
-- 
http://www.fabiankeil.de/
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