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Re: Dealing with drivers that need firmware on the filesystem



On Sun, Jan 09, 2005 at 02:36:03AM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:

> An alternative would be to leave non-free firmware in non-free, but not
> to enforce the requirement that drivers depending on it end up in
> contrib. This is possibly the most straight forward, and by squinting
> funny we could possibly even argue that the social contract already
> allows this.

I believe this is our best option.  AIUI, in many cases we don't have any
license to redistribute the firmware anyway, so the support mechanisms need
to be there regardless; at which point there doesn't even seem to be a
strong convenience argument for distributing such firmware in main, even if
people accepted that convenience was sufficient rationale.

I don't think I have a problem, conceptually, with a kernel package which
provides drivers for 10,000 different types of hardware, and needs to load
firmware from disk for 300 of them, being in main (without a
Depends:/Recommends: relationship on the firmware-providing packages).

-- 
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer

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