[arch-projects] [netctl] [PATCH] wifi-menu: Support UTF-8 encoded SSIDs (FS#45384)

[Emil Velikov]

On 26 June 2018 at 11:34, Jouke Witteveen <j.witteveen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 12:17 PM Emil Velikov <emil.l.velikov at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 23 June 2018 at 12:25, Jouke Witteveen via arch-projects
>> <arch-projects at archlinux.org> wrote:
>> > Strictly speaking, we should check with the SSIDEncoding value sent out
>> > by the station, as specified in the 2012 version of 802.11 (page 566),
>> > but wpa_supplicant does not (yet) expose this information and stations
>> > may not set the field to UTF-8 and still encode their SSID accordingly.
>> >
>> I wonder if iwd (meant to be wpa_supplicant replacement) could help here.
>> Be that by exposing SSIDEncoding or setting it, as it detects UTF-8 in the SSID.
>
> As far as I can tell, only developers of iwd think of iwd as a
> wpa_supplicant replacement. Currently, it is lacking a CLI and
> documentation. Moreover, wpa_supplicant is tried and tested. While I
> try to not tie netctl in too strongly with any specific client,
> wpa_supplicant will likely be the client of choice for netctl for the
> foreseeable future.
>
I've noticed the iwctl and iwmon utils provided, although did not play
around with them.
You're on point though, sticking with wpa_supplicant for the
foreseeable future is fine.

> I submitted a patch to wpa_supplicant for exposing the UTF-8 SSID bit:
> http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/hostap/2018-June/038658.html
> However, experimentation showed that it is not really used (yet?).
>
Vendors may start using it... one day

Thanks again for the comprehensive answers!
Emil