Quoting Thomas Goirand (2022-05-11 17:14:57)
For backwards compatibility, I think that the firmware component is
going to need to be a subset of non-free; i.e. packages are going to
need to be *copied* not moved from non-free to the firmware component,
which means they would be available from both non-free components.
I think that's a good idea as it wouldn't break any setups. The number of
packages in non-free-firmware is probably very small and the package data would
not be duplicated on the mirrors anyways because non-free and non-free-firmware
would both reference the same deb archives in the /pool directory, right?
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. I'd prefer doing this, as having copies of the same
package in both non-free and non-free-firmware is (IMO) a mess.
Maybe I'm lacking imagination but which approach would you take to do this
reliably? If you go that route, then a heuristic is not enough. You must not
break existing setups and you must also make sure never to get into a situation
where that automation has to bail out or otherwise a system will end up without
non-free-firmware even though it had non-free enabled.
What do you propose?
I'm also curious because I would like to do arbitrary machine-edits of
user-supplied apt sources.list files but so far nothing worked reliably enough.
Thanks!
cheers, josch