Re: Firmwares (was Re: Bits from the DPL)
On Mon, 1 Apr 2024 at 19:28, Vincent Bernat <bernat@debian.org> wrote:
>
> On 2024-04-01 18:05, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> > The included firmware contributed to Debian 12 being a huge success,
> > but it wasn't the only factor.
>
> Unfortunately, the shipped firmwares are now almost a year old,
> including for unstable. I am following the progress since quite a few
> years and I have seen many possible contributors trying to help and
> fail. The current situation is that Debian does not work well with
> recent AMD-based laptops due to firmware being too old. Therefore, we
> are back at users trying to update the firmware by copying them from
> random places (as for myself, I am using the deb generated by upstream's
> Makefile).
>
> My personal impression is that we are repeating a common scheme in
> Debian: maintainers don't have time to move forward due to the task
> being non-trivial for reasons of our own, people are proposing to help
> (6 people in [1]), but this is ignored by the maintainers as they don't
> have time.
As one of the persons who tried and failed to do the update, I
wouldn't blame maintainers ignoring my PR. I would have appreciated
getting more prompt feedback, but I understand that we all are doing
this during our spare time.
There was another issue which I could not find my way through. I found
it pretty troublesome to update debian/config subdirs. There is no
clear reference whether the Version should follow the WHENCE or the
firmware version from the git commit message (they differ for Intel BT
files). So, my 2c, packaging infrastructure should use WHENCE file
where possible instead of duplicating a significant part of it.
--
With best wishes
Dmitry
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