FWIW, wireless isn't unique in this regard. For eg, the last few months we've
always been shipping the latest ALSA bits rather than what's in kernel.org too,
for similar reasons -- when bugs appear, the developers want to know
"does it still happen with the latest bits?"
this is the part that concerns me. The fact that you feel the need to use "not yet in mainline" pieces
(I'm not so much talking about backporting from 2.6.26-git to 2.6.25; that's perfectly fine, but I'm
talking about code not in 2.6.26-git) is NOT a healthy sign.... if that truely is the case then that code surely
deserves to be in mainline as well?
That's more a case of Fedora living on the bleeding edge. The code is
fairly stable, all in linux-next, but the churn tends to be high because
of internal API changes that affect all drivers. Currently, I don't
think there is actually any _feature_ pending in linux-next, only
internal cleanups. Such cleanups are desirable, but at the same time can
lead to instability, hence being kept out of .26-git for the time being,
and are in -next for .27. Mostly because we only wrote them after .26
started.