2022, ഏപ്രിൽ 19 5:57:46 AM IST, Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com>ൽ എഴുതി
>This tension extends to our installation and live media. As non-free is
>officially not considered part of Debian, our official media cannot include
>anything from non-free. This has been a deliberate policy for many years.
>Instead, we have for some time been building a limited parallel set of
>"unofficial non-free" images which include non-free firmware. These non-free
>images are produced by the same software that we use for the official images,
>and by the same team.
>
>There are a number of issues here that make developers and users unhappy:
>
> 1. Building, testing and publishing two sets of images takes more effort.
Can we reduce the tests? Do we really need to test both images for all cases?
> 2. We don't really want to be providing non-free images at all, from a
> philosophy point of view. So we mainly promote and advertise the preferred
> official free images. That can be a cause of confusion for users. We do
> link to the non-free images in various places, but they're not so easy to
> find.
I'm fine making it easier to find.
> 3. Using non-free installation media will cause more installations to use
> non-free software by default. That's not a great story for us, and we may
> end up with more of our users using non-free software and believing that
> it's all part of Debian.
So a separate non-free firmware section as you proposed could work.
> 4. A number of users and developers complain that we're wasting their time by
> publishing official images that are just not useful for a lot (a majority?)
> of users.
Isn't voluntary work being able to work on things you care and not necessarily what majority wants?
I can understand if the current volunteers that produce and test fully free images don't want to continue and no one else step up. Shouldn't this be a call for volunteers ?
May be more people step in to maintain the free images if there is a call for volunteers.
>We should do better than this.
>
>Options
>=======
>
>The status quo is a mess, and I believe we can and should do things
>differently.
>
>I see several possible options that the images team can choose from here.
>However, several of these options could undermine the principles of Debian. We
>don't want to make fundamental changes like that without the clear backing of
>the wider project. That's why I'm writing this...
>
> 1. Keep the existing setup. It's horrible, but maybe it's the best we can do?
> (I hope not!)
>
As I said earlier, making non-free more prominent and more volunteers to maintain fully free images could work to reduce load on existing volunteers.
> 2. We could just stop providing the non-free unofficial images altogether.
> That's not really a promising route to follow - we'd be making it even
> harder for users to install our software. While ideologically pure, it's
> not going to advance the cause of Free Software.
I think we should continue creating non-free images.
> 3. We could stop pretending that the non-free images are unofficial, and maybe
> move them alongside the normal free images so they're published together.
> This would make them easier to find for people that need them, but is
> likely to cause users to question why we still make any images without
> firmware if they're otherwise identical.
This should be fine. This could be used as an opportunity to educate users and recommending to choose hardware which works with free images. We can highlight h-node.org here.
> 4. The images team technically could simply include non-free into the official
> images, and add firmware packages to the input lists for those images.
> However, that would still leave us with problem 3 from above (non-free
> generally enabled on most installations).
I don't think we should do this.
> 5. We could split out the non-free firmware packages into a new
> non-free-firmware component in the archive, and allow a specific exception
> only to allow inclusion of those packages on our official media. We would
> then generate only one set of official media, including those non-free
> firmware packages.
I'm okay with it only if we don't get enough volunteers to maintain two images.
> (We've already seen various suggestions in recent years to split up the
> non-free component of the archive like this, for example into
> non-free-firmware, non-free-doc, non-free-drivers, etc. Disagreement
> (bike-shedding?) about the split caused us to not make any progress on
> this. I believe this project should be picked up and completed. We don't
> have to make a perfect solution here immediately, just something that works
> well enough for our needs today. We can always tweak and improve the setup
> incrementally if that's needed.)
>
>These are the most likely possible options, in my opinion. If you have a better
>suggestion, please let us know!
As mentioned earlier, call for volunteers to maintain two sets or reducing the number of test cases (some cases only tested with non-free and some tested only with free images)
>I'd like to take this set of options to a GR, and do it soon. I want to get a
>clear decision from the wider Debian project as to how to organise firmware and
>installation images. If we do end up changing how we do things, I want a clear
>mandate from the project to do that.
>
>My preference, and rationale
>============================
>
>Mainly, I want to see how the project as a whole feels here - this is a big
>issue that we're overdue solving.
>
>What would I choose to do? My personal preference would be to go with option 5:
>split the non-free firmware into a special new component and include that on
>official media.
>
>Does that make me a sellout? I don't think so. I've been passionately
>supporting and developing Free Software for more than half my life. My
>philosophy here has not changed. However, this is a complex and nuanced
>situation. I firmly believe that sharing software freedom with our users comes
>with a responsibility to also make our software useful. If users can't easily
>install and use Debian, that helps nobody.
>
>By splitting things out here, we would enable users to install and use Debian
>on their hardware, without promoting/pushing higher-level non-free software in
>general. I think that's a reasonable compromise. This is simply a change to
>recognise that hardware requirements have moved on over the years.
>
>Further work
>============
>
>If we do go with the changes in option 5, there are other things we could do
>here for better control of and information about non-free firmware:
>
> 1. Along with adding non-free firmware onto media, when the installer (or live
> image) runs, we should make it clear exactly which firmware packages have
> been used/installed to support detected hardware. We could link to docs
> about each, and maybe also to projects working on Free re-implementations.
Good idea.
> 2. Add an option at boot to explicitly disable the use of the non-free
> firmware packages, so that users can choose to avoid them.
>
>Acknowledgements
>================
>
>Thanks to people who reviewed earlier versions of this document and/or made
>suggestions for improvement, in particular:
>
> • Cyril Brulebois
> • Matthew Garrett
> • David Leggett
> • Martin Michlmayr
> • Andy Simpkins
> • Neil Williams
>
--
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