On Thu, 2009-04-23 at 19:19 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> writes: > > > Okay. So I take it then that you would be against separate packaging > > for Linux-Libre for Debian, and prefer instead to apply all its > > changes to Debian's Linux? No, but I am committed to separating sourceless binaries from the kernel package. > I know this wasn't addressed to me, but I feel the urge to weigh in. > > I think the removal of even the ability to load non-free firmware is > stupid and self-defeating and certainly don't think that should be done > in Debian, in either the main Linux kernel packages or, for that matter, > in a separate package. (I'm sure the security team doesn't want to do > twice as many kernel security builds just to support that particular > exercise.) I don't see either of those happening. > Whatever other work the Linux-Libre folks, or anyone else for that > matter, do to cleanly separate firmware from the Linux kernel (even for > free firmware, as far as I'm concerned) seems like a good thing to > adopt. I was previously unaware of Linux Libre and its removal scripts, and they may be useful to compare against. However, I believe Linux Libre goes rather too far. Aside from the fact that it removes even the option of loading firmware, which does not seem to be in line with the Debian social contract, it disables some drivers with obscure initialisation tables even though these are plausible preferred forms of modification. > As with any other Debian package, the best approach for adoption is to > get the patches adopted upstream so that everyone can benefit and we > don't have to maintain local divergences. Right, we're doing that. > It sounds like Ben Hutchings > and the Debian kernel team have been doing great work in this area, and > I can only stand and applaud their excellent, constructive resolution of > this problem in a way that's consistent with all of our ideals. There are a whole lot of people working on this - David Woodhouse and Jaswinder Singh have probably done the most work upstream. Ben.
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