Re: Getting d-i to find firmware on the CD generated by debian-cd

[Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl>]

On Tuesday 16 March 2010, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> Further testing of this fix proved that it is insufficient.  hw-detect
> call check-missing-firmware, which look on several devices (disk, USB
> sticks, floppies) for firmware, but fail to look on the CD itself.
> This, I must admit, is very sad.  I had a look at the source of
> check-missing-firmware and saw it was looking in the firmware/
> directory of several devices, and assumed it would also check the boot
> media, but no. :(
>
> Should hw-detect also look for firmware on the CD?

I think the problem with that is that including the firmware on the CD in 
the first place is in contradiction with Debian's current policy not to 
include firmware in the distribution.
The current firmware support is very explicitly limited to support loading 
from external media *prepared by the user*.

An additional issue with non-free firmware is that including it in the way 
you propose would (I think) mean it will get loaded without any prompting 
of the user, which may in some cases violate licence terms.

I can see that others may want to do things differently, but I'm not sure 
how much we can/should support that in standard D-I functionality.

One option you have is to implement a custom, alternative version of
'mountmedia' for d-edu.

Cheers,
FJP

P.S. Personally I would like to have more default support for loading 
firmware, but IMO we cannot do that without discussion with the rest of 
the project.