After I got a working wireless card I was finally able to fix the xfce4-wavelan plugin. After I had ported it to the Xfce 4.4 API it stopped working on a lot of systems. I don't think that I caused this, I think it was more the recompilation against updated wireless stack in the kernel that was what highlighted it.
The fix was quite simple in the end. I looked at the source of wireless-tools, and came up with this diff.
It seems some implementations interpreted the 0 as some large number or similar, most took it to mean 0, and returned E2BIG. Setting it to the size of the returned object allowed it to work.- wreq.u.data.length = 0;
+ wreq.u.data.length = sizeof(struct iw_statistics);
Until I get a goodies account sorted out then I will host the release at http://jameswestby.net/debian/, including some unofficial Debian packages.
[Update: I have just release 0.5.2 as well, this fixes the other bugs that I wanted to. Only one left that I know about (stats slightly wrong sometimes, but I don't know if that can be helped).]