[gentoo-user] wpa_supplicant.conf incongruity

[Mick]

This must be the third if not fourth time the syntax in wpa_supplicant.conf 
bit me - I don't learn easily!  ;-)

The comments in the example configuration file installed with wpa_supplicant 
provided under /usr/share/doc/wpa_supplicant-2.6-r10/wpa_supplicant.conf.bz2 
explain a Unix control socket for external programs (wpa_cli, wpa_gui, etc.) 
to access will be created in a (default) directory:

/var/run/wpa_supplicant

To set access controls for socket(s) which will be created in this directory 
you can define a GROUP in the wpa_supplicant.conf file, so non-root users may 
scan for APs and set passwords for them using cli/gui applications.  A syntax 
is given in this file to explain how to go about specifying a GROUP name for 
managing the cli/gui interface:

# When configuring both the directory and group, use following format:
# DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=wheel
# DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=0
# (group can be either group name or gid)
#
# For UDP connections (default on Windows): The value will be ignored. This
# variable is just used to select that the control interface is to be created.
# The value can be set to, e.g., udp (ctrl_interface=udp)

Here's where things go a bit off-piste.  There's an uncommented entry  in the 
next paragraph specifying not an IP protocol, but a Unix socket like so:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant


Having read the above and more in the example file, I thought the way to 
define a GROUP would be to just add a single directive, e.g.:

GROUP=users

But this causes wpa_supplicant to fail complaining about my GROUP entry above.  
Fair enough, from what it says I should also specify the directory.  So I 
copied and pasted verbatim:

DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=wheel

Again wpa_supplicant fails to start complaining about the whole line I just 
added.  :-/

So, I look at older wpa_supplicant.conf files of mine and discover the 
directive needed to specify a GROUP is:

ctrl_interface_group=wheel

which works faultlessly each time.

Am I missing something here, or is the example provided for 
wpa_supplicant.conf incorrect/incomplete and merits a bug report?

-- 
Regards,
Mick