On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 13:45 -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote: > On Thu, 13 Sep 2012, Nikolaus Rath wrote: > > I think this should be mentioned somewhere *much* more prominent. I > > consider myself pretty tech-savy, but only stumbled upon this just now > > on the this list. Can a non-free package be made essential or > > required? It seems there is really absolutely no-reason other than > > non-freeness for not installing this by default. > It is also worth notice that enabling non-free is not just optional, it is > officially discouraged: non-free is not even mentioned by the Debian Wheezy > installer unless you're in expert mode. The main problem I see is that there seem to be essentially two types of packages in non-free right now, namely those that contain firmware/microcode (etc) and are crucial for correctly working hardware and the rest. Most users, and even those that prefer to install only free software, would probably want to install all packages from non-free that are appropriate for their hardware. > And yes, the only reason to not have it installed by default on every x86 > Debian system with an Intel or AMD processor is the non-freeness. It is quite unfortunate that users who decide to not install non-free software have to accept the fact that their hardware might work unreliable (if at all). New users should, however, be made aware of this fact and offered help during the installation to install appropriate packages. (either by the installer or by making this explicit in the documentation) -- Wolodja <debian@babilen5.org> 4096R/CAF14EFC 081C B7CD FF04 2BA9 94EA 36B2 8B7F 7D30 CAF1 4EFC
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