Bug#939798: floppy support in d-i [Was: Re: Bug#939798: kickseed: remove floppy support]

[Holger Wansing <hwansing@mailbox.org>]

Hi,

John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> 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.

Since no new arguments (pro or contra floppy support in d-i) were given, I 
suppose it looks like we will keep the status quo and therefore close the
related bugs.


Holger



-- 
Holger Wansing <hwansing@mailbox.org>
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