On Sun, 2012-08-05 at 13:10 -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote: > reassign 661069 base-installer 1.125 > quit > > Julien Cristau wrote: > > On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 15:29:57 -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote: > > >> d-i team: can you reproduce this? Does installing on a machine with a > >> radeon not warn about missing firmware? Is that fixable, for example > >> by using vesafb instead for affected cards when the firmware is > >> missing? > > > > I have no radeon hardware. I wouldn't expect the installer to warn > > since it doesn't know anything about radeon. Maybe the kernel install > > does, I wouldn't know. > > Ok, thanks. The kernel postinst says: > > # If we are installing (not upgrading) a package for a newer > # upstream version than that of the running kernel, check whether > # the user might be missing necessary firmware, perhaps because > # it has now been removed from the kernel. > > Perhaps this logic doesn't kick in because the kernel being installed > is the same version as the kernel in the installer environment. In > any event, it would be nice for the d-i code to do something special > so the user is not just warned but a fallback automatically applied. > > Reassigning to base-installer. The original purpose of the warning was to let users know about the removal of firmware that was previously embedded in drivers, which might require them to explicitly install a firmware package (since we must not use Recommends to install non-free packages automatically). The warning is deliberately suppressed in case of: 1. A fresh installation. The user is assumed to have made a conscious choice whether to install non-free firmware. 2. An upgrade which doesn't increase the upstream version, which normally won't change the requested firmware files. Again, the user is assumed to have made the choice after upgrading to this upstream version. Maybe the linux-image packages should also warn in case 1, probably using a different message. Another example of the problem here: http://lwn.net/Articles/506543/ Ben. -- Ben Hutchings Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.
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