On Wed, 2022-05-11 at 17:14 +0200, Thomas Goirand wrote:
A work around would be to have some automation to check if non-free is
activated, and (propose to) update the sources.list automatically to add
non-free-firmware.
That isn't feasible, since apt sources are managed external to Debian.
At my workplace we have $foo-apt-config* packages that manage our apt
sources, modifying them would cause us conffile prompts and that would
mean that upgrades to our $foo-apt-config* packages would get blocked,
since unattended-upgrades skips packages with conffile prompts.
Other people use configuration management systems that overwrite
modified files and probably manage their apt sources using those
systems, so Debian changes to apt sources would get removed.
Others might be running Debian on read-only squashfs images so they
would never get the apt sources modifications needed to get firmware
from non-free, their image builds could either just fail or maybe
silently fail to install the needed firmware files.
I'd prefer doing this, as having copies of the same package in both
non-free and non-free-firmware is (IMO) a mess.
Having the same package in unstable and testing works fine, I don't
see why it would be different for non-free and non-free/firmware.