Comment 37 for bug 123773

Thank you for reporting this bug and helping to improve Ubuntu.

The justification for the extra 'ifconfig' call in wireless-tools does not apply in jaunty, so I've reverted that change for Ubuntu 9.04. Changelog follows:

wireless-tools (29-1.1ubuntu2) jaunty; urgency=low

  * Revert change to bring up the interface before changing wireless
    settings; the softmac driver this was implemented for is now
    obsolete, no other drivers are reported to need it, and it
    introduces other problems such as breaking PPP interfaces
    (LP: #268519) and preventing configuration of some settings such as
    hardware addresses (LP: #219520).

Unfortunately, the justification for this change *does* apply to Ubuntu 8.04, so simply reverting the patch is inappropriate for an SRU as it would cause regressions for anyone using wireless with the softmac driver.

For Ubuntu 8.10, wireless-tools is no longer a dependency of ubuntu-minimal, which mitigates the severity of this problem for any server users running Ubuntu 8.10. But changing the dependencies of ubuntu-minimal is also not a fix that I think would be appropriate for inclusion in an Ubuntu 8.04 SRU.

So I don't have any good suggestions on how to resolve this for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, but given the significant impact it's reported to have for server users in certain configurations, I'm accepting the hardy nomination for the bug for further consideration.