Re: Bug reports of DFSG violations are tagged ???lenny-ignore????
On Wed, 22 Oct 2008, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 21 2008, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> > On Tue, 21 Oct 2008, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >> acceleration, right? So the box can be installed, and is usable for
> >> non-gaming purposes. The drm stuff can possibly be gotten from non
> >
> > You can always use VESA, yes. I don't think the X.org driver can get an ATI
> > GPU to work without the memory management *microcode* (but I didn't know that
> > thing was still non-free).
>
> That should be good enough to install, and then add non-free to
> sources.list and get the firmware required for the driver to work
> (absent a non-free debian installer that bundles non-free bits). This
> is no different from what I have had to do already for my nvidia card
> (degraded X support until I arranged to have non-free nvidia drivers
> installed). I would think that was an acceptable solution.
As someone who only owns ATI GPUs and one legacy nVidia GPU (I don't have
any Intel, basically because I couldn't get good enough screens in the
Laptops with Intel graphics at the time I bought them and when I got the
nVidia, ATI was still as closed as a clamp), I would consider the above
solution to be acceptable.
I also deem it acceptable if we as a project were to proceed by refusing to
add any and every *new* driver that requires non-free components to Debian,
adding them to non-free when possible, and removing them completely when we
don't have the right to distribute the non-free components at all (i.e. it
is not good even for non-free).
I can deal with a two-step install process for my video cards, as long as it
is properly documented. But I would serioulsy recommend that we produce
easy to use non-free installer disks to go along with the Debian installer
disks, not because of the GPUs, but because of the network cards. If this
would slow down the release too much, make these AFTER the release, there is
no reason why we can't release non-free a bit later.
Whether ATI microcode still deserves to be in non-free is an orthogonal
issue.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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