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severity 706659 normal thanks On 2013-05-05 21:29, Ben Hutchings wrote: On Sun, 2013-05-05 at 20:57 -0400, Filipus Klutiero wrote:Hi Ben, could you explain why you changed this report's severity to wishlist? wishlist severity is designed for mere RFEs.This *is* a request for enhancement. It is, but it is not a mere request for enhancement. wishlist severity is not designed for bug reports. Previously, you wrote:Therefore, the prompt is misleading and may cause the user to install unneeded software or change hardware without a strong reason.There are very few cases where the current statement is incorrect. In your example, the Realtek PHY firmware patch is needed because (if I understand correctly) the ROM firmware is incompatible with a lot of other Ethernet devices and won't establish a link. Even though it may not affect the specific cable and switch you were using during installation, you will not want to find out about this bug when you plug the machine in somewhere else! (And I don't want to see this bug being reported against the driver.) The proper way to avoid such reports would be to warn admins if a buggy firmware is detected (and ideally offering an update). Even if there are few cases where the current statement is incorrect, this is a bug. If you're confident that there are few cases, feel free to set severity to minor, but I have 2 personal PCs, and both have a device where the current formulation is inappropriate. I don't know much about this specific example, but I'm skeptical about Realtek shipping a firmware which fails in "a lot" of scenarios, and continuing to pre-install that buggy firmware today. I don't understand what you mean about changing hardware. Is this about people who think firmware is evil if it's on disk but not if it's in flash? I don't know, but there must be reasons why the missing firmware is not in Debian. Some admins may prefer changing their hardware to taking that risk. Radeon cards are good examples of devices which are improved by firmware without being unusable without.The current AMD GPUs cannot be used without firmware, except through the userland VESA driver which has appalling performance and doesn't support the native resolution of most displays (or any widescreen displays, AFAIK). We definitely should be alerting users that this hardware does need firmware to work properly. OK, I was thinking about older GPUs such as Radeon HD 5650M, which can use the radeon driver without installing non-free firmware. Anyway, both of these cases are good examples; even in your case, the current prompt says firmware is needed for the devices to operate. "Operate" and "work properly" are not the same. And even "work properly" would not be quite true - if vesa works bug-free, I'd say the device can "work properly". Maybe not "work well". |