Bug#1039872: Improve firmware package inclusion
Package: debian-installer
Severity: normal
As mentioned in #1038440 and elsewhere, some of our media builds are
too big and this is mostly due to inclusion of firmware packages. Some
growth is not unexpected, but we're including firmware packages that
are not useful, e.g.:
* nvidia firmware packages from the nvidia-graphics-drivers* source
package are not useful without non-free drivers that we're not
shipping in our images
(https://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2023/01/msg00157.html)
* we're currently including raspi-firmware for all arches, while it's
only useful for arm*
I think we could really do with some extra metadata for the firmware
packages to help us determine what to include on media. Maybe:
* "this firmware works/does not work with free drivers in Debian"
* "this is generic firmware, useful for all arches"
* "this firmware is useful for arches <<foo, bar, baz>> only"
What other information would be helpful?
In the meantime, I'm about to add support for firmware-ignore list(s)
in debian-cd.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 11.7
APT prefers oldstable-updates
APT policy: (500, 'oldstable-updates'), (500, 'oldstable-security'), (500, 'oldoldstable'), (500, 'oldstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386
Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-22-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_WARN, TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
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