Re: Firmware - what are we going to do about it?

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

Hi Steve et al,

On Tue, Apr 19, 2022 at 01:27:46AM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> TL;DR: firmware support in Debian sucks, and we need to change this. See the
> "My preference, and rationale" Section below.

Thank you for the excellent write-up.

>  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.

My perception is that we already have largely consensus on this option
despite a few vocal minorities disagreeing with it.

I think that the main disagreements fall into one of two categories:

 * Debian should provide an entirely free installation media.
 * The user should have a choice for whether to run/install non-free
   firmware.

A few people have spoken in favour of continuing the building of free
images. Can you give more intuition on how much extra cost (work) these
images add if the alternative is to only produce the ones with non-free
firmware? How about reducing the effort to test free images?

I imagine here that we kinda reverse our current presentation. Rather
than show the free ones and hide the non-free ones, we'd present the
ones with firmware as official installation media. I trust that those
users that really need the free ones, will be able to locate them
despite not being presented prominently.

If continuing the production of free images does not impose an undue
workload, I think we could increase the consensus for an option 5b (and
also produce hidden free images).

Regarding the choice, Russ and others mentioned that the presentation of
that choice is not encoded in the option. From a GR-pov, I think that's
the right way forward. However, we may discuss it separately.

The argument about making an informed choice seems rather convincing to
me. As such, I'd prefer for the default installation to do the
following:
 * Check whether any non-free firmware is being used by the installer.
   I'm not 100% sure whether this is possible with reasonable effort and
   precision, but an approximation might not be too bad. A first try
   could be: dmesg | grep "firmware: direct-loading firmware"
 * Add a prompt to the default installation that asks whether non-free
   firmware should be included in the installation. It should also
   indicate whether non-free firmware has already been used in the
   process of booting the installation media. Regardless of whether it
   has been used, I'd prefer the default answer to be "yes".
 * Possibly add a second prompt in case firmware has been used and the
   user said "no" to ask for confirmation as this outcome would be
   very unlikely.
 * The prompts should be preseedable. This one likely is easy.

I understand that much of what I'm proposing here puts extra load on the
installer team. That's why I'm interested in better understanding how
much extra work that'd be and whether it's worth.

My expectation is that these two adaptions would alleviate much of the
concern presented in this thread.

>From a practical side, I'd likely put option 5 (without the extra
changes requested here) somewhere close to the top for all the good
reasons given in this thread. Quite clearly, the default installation
medium should work and it kinda does not right now.

Helmut