Hello, On Tue, 9 Sep 2025, at 02:28, Daed Wheless wrote: > I am filing this not as a bug but as a regression complaint. In > Debian Bullseye, hostapd accepted lowercase ISO country codes > (e.g.country_code=us) without issue. > After upgrading to Bookworm, hostapd now fails to start with:
<...> > Changing country_code=us → country_code=US fixes it. > > This is technically “correct” according to the ISO 3166-1 standard, > but it is a breaking change for existing working configs. Many systems > that ran reliably for years now silently fail after a distribution > upgrade, leaving users without Wi-Fi AP functionality. <...> > Document this change in Debian Bookworm release notes and Raspberry > Pi OS upgrade notes. Ideally, restore the previous behavior of normalizing > lowercase input instead of rejecting it. Breaking existing > configurations over case-sensitivity is user-hostile and undermines > trust in smooth distribution upgrades. I’m sorry, but this change was committed to hostapd back in 2020. Bookworm itself was released in 2023, that’s two years ago. The fix, as you noted, is quite trivial. Besides, as far as I understand, the versions before 2020 "accepted" the incorrect configuration by simply ignoring the error, but it was silently failing further in processing (in the kernel). I don’t see any urgent need for a change. -- Cheers, Andrej
