Re: orion5x housekeeping
* Karsten Merker <merker@debian.org> [2016-01-02 13:23]:
> As a personal note: I am happy for everybody who uses d-i to install
> a proper Debian instead of using a pre-made installation in the form
> of an SD-card image that some unknown entitiy on the internet has
> uploaded to some share-hoster, which is unfortunately rather common
> in the armhf world and which is a security nightmare. Putting up
> additional hurdles for adding platform support in d-i will probably
> end up in more people going the dangerous but easy route of using
> pre-made installation images from questionable sources, and I think
> that we surely don't want that.
I agree with you that users should use d-i rather than some unofficial
SD image or tar ball that claims to be "Debian".
At the same time, I'm worried that users will get devices, install
Debian, only to find out that the next release no longer works because
there's no maintainer in Debian. If we add support for a device,
there should be some reasonable assumption or mechanism to ensure that
the device will be supported in the future. Of course this is hard in
a volunteer project. (And I know what I'm talking about, given that I
added support for a number of devices and then stopped doing ARM work
a few years ago, although I did at least give my devices to Ian who
did a great job of keeping stuff working :).
The number of ARM devices is growing rapidly. As you point out, it's
much easier to support new devices, but imho there should be a way to
differentiate between devices that have good support (we provide an
u-boot image, there's a maintainer in Debian and upstream, etc; "tier
1") and devices that may work (there's a DT blob and you can add a
flash-kernel entry).
By the way, I'm still getting emails from NSLU2 users from time to
time and there's nobody in Debian left who cares about this device.
I think we also need a hardware deprecation mechanism, so we tell
users in advance that support is going to be dropped (or that a device
is moving from "tier X" to "tier Y").
Martin, wishful thinking in the new year :)
--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/
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