Comment 12 for bug 415719

I'm sorry for the delay.
The sysfs patch I commited is not a clean solution. The sysfs seems to be full of workarounds. Because the kernel doc states that "Accessing /sys/class/net/eth0/device is a bug in the application." you should not use wicd-sysfs-wifi-detect.patch.

I further investigated how to detect wireless devices by looking at the wireless-tools source code. The proper way until the new nl80211 subsystem totally replaces wireless-extensions, is using ioctls like I have done in the attached patch.

According to http://wireless.kernel.org/en/developers/Documentation/Wireless-Extensions this won't stop working in the future.

Wireless-Extensions are pretty old, so using this method should be compatible with kernels >= 2.6.13 (if not even older versions)

Markus