Bug#939798: floppy support in d-i [Was: Re: Bug#939798: kickseed: remove floppy support]
On 9/8/19 11:43 PM, Holger Wansing wrote:
I assume, this bugreport was motivated by bug #880122 by Chris Lamb from 2017,
which proposed to remove floppy support from hw-detect package, since
floppies appear to no longer be widely used for ages:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=880122
The same bugreport made me working on preparations for removing floppy support
from debian-installer templates recently:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2019/09/msg00057.html
(...)
With this "Debian Ports" argumentation, we need a discussion on this topic
first, as it seems.
The standard floppy driver in the kernel just recently got a new maintainer [1]
and Linus underlined that the floppy driver is still useful for virtualization
environments (I can't find the LKML post at the moment).
It's super easy to create a floppy image with just the dd tool and use it in
qemu or on servers.
Please do not assume that all users are just on x86 laptops with no optical
drives or floppy drives. I know that a lot of people don't use optical or
floppy media anymore, but that doesn't mean there is still a use case for it.
Like with serial connections, floppy drives are simple enough that they work
in basically every environment, so having them as a simple fallback is
incredibly useful and unless there is a very good reason for removing floppy
support - i.e. code that is broken or blocks other new code - I'm objecting
to removing floppy support and would be willing to take care of it.
Thanks,
Adrian
[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/7/31/771
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
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