Re: Summary of the DebConf firmware discussion
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First of all, thanks for having this discussion. I think it is a serious
problem. Debian is currently hard to install on many machines, and I very much
dislike the idea of telling people to enable all of non-free because of some
hardware. Installing a package manually and then no longer updating is also
not a good idea (even though it is unlikely that we can fix much in those
packages, it's just wrong to keep them out of the automatic update process).
On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 03:54:56PM +0200, Jan Hauke Rahm wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 01:15:21PM +0200, Paul Wise wrote:
> > non-free/docs
> > non-free/firmware
> > non-free/drivers
> > non-free/web
> > non-free/comm
> > non-free/formats
> > non-free/apps
>
> I don't care much for making this more complicated, but splitting
> non-free may find many (even reasonable) metrics to do so.
What you're describing is debtags. For users who want that sort of control, it
may be useful to add functionality to apt to hide packages that match some rule
involving debtags. It will download the full package list, but it only
presents what the user chose to see.
On the other hand, if I see the above list, it seems like splitting non-free
into the sections it already has might also be an idea. My guess is no split
in the archive is really needed for that; instead, we'd need to have some way
to download a package list of one section at a time. In other words,
sources.list should be able to include something like:
deb http://http.debian.net unstable main non-free/kernel
My guess is that this is also relatively easy to implement, but I haven't
looked at the code at all, so I may be wrong about that.
> Think of some package with a non-commercial clause in its otherwise free
> license. Many of our users are non-commercial and could use
> non-free/non-commercial. Or think of those non-military/non-evil licenses
> which (almost) any private citizen and even many companies could use.
Everything in non-free can be used by people, otherwise we couldn't distribute
it. If people want to only not use things they aren't allowed to use, they
should enable all of non-free and read the licenses. The debtags approach I
described above may help (and even without apt helping, users can use debtags
to find their packages).
About the installation media: I agree that they are part of main, and therefore
should not contain the firmware. On the other hand, I think it is important
that it is easy for users to install Debian and on many systems that is not
currently the case. A firmware bundle that is automatically detected at
installer boot seems like a good option to me. I also didn't know those
existed, and so I don't know how easy it is to use them. I don't think
messages are particularly important; users will ignore them anyway, and by
downloading and preparing the firmware bundle they have already indicated that
they want to use it. I'm opposed to more messages than usual, otherwise the
Windows-effect of users not reading them and just clicking Ok, Agree, Continue
will happen. There should of course be a message at the download link of the
bundle, but no "I Agree"-button IMO. We're trying to help them, not annoy
them.
Finally, I think we should advertize those bundles. We should be clear that
they are non-free and therefore not part of Debian, but also that they may need
them. We even say in our SC that we don't have a problem with people who need
non-free things, so we shouldn't make life hard for them by hiding things that
we know they need.
Thanks,
Bas
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