Re: What's the deal with discover*?
[Cyril Brulebois]
> I don't understand why the maintainer is said to be debian-boot@ if
> the code is in svn, rather than git; and under the pkg-discover group,
> rather than the d-i one…
In short, historical reasons from before your time. :)
The packages discover and discover-data were taken under the wings of
debian-boot@ when Proginy stopped maintaining it, as it was the best
option to ensure a good installation experience in Debian due to its
excellent ability to map hardware to kernel modules and packages. But
no-one took the time to migrate the svn repo from its existing one to
the d-i one, and I guess it was forgotten when d-i migrated from
subversion to git.
Note, building discover is a bit painful, and could use some work to
make it easier to maintain.
> See https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2016/01/msg00352.html
>
> Given your previous mail, I doubt isenkram is going to help.
Well, isenkram have the /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware script
to handle firmware packages, and it could be a good replacement. It is
using the equivalent of a 'apt-file search /lib/firmware/' to locate
packages with firmware in them.
As far as I know, discover isn't used to find firmware packages any
more, so updates for discover seem irrelevant regarding the introduction
of a non-free-firmware section. The firmware handling is done by
hw-detect. I can probably help to get it updated to use the new
section, which seem like a very good idea to get computers working
without having to enable the entire non-free APT source.
One thing that would help a lot is to get the firmware packages to
announce their firmware using appstream metadata. This would make it a
lot easier to locate the correct firmware package, and would help both
isenkram and all others interested in operating on firmware data.
>>> I'm making a note locally (but my to do list is ever-growing), but
>>> feel free to file a bug report against src:debian-installer or
>>> d-i.debian.org (where I keep infrastructure-related and
>>> cross-packages bug reports) to make sure it's easily found by
>>> others.
>>
>> I am planning to commit the fixes myself, so you do not need to keep it
>> on your long todo list. :)
>
> This paragraph was meant for the “consider such a move” discussion (to
> make sure it happens at some point), not for discover fixes, which
> should be tracked in bug reports against src:discover(-data).
The fixes I had in mind was in hw-detect, which has the d-i code using
discover today. But you are right, we should weed out the details
first. :)
I guess I should start following debian-boot@ if we are going to do
that, as I am not following it today. Too many emails and too little
time to read them. :)
--
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen
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