Before there was a concerted campaign to separate firmware blobs out of drivers in Linux, we generated a few firmware packages for specific drivers and driver families: firmware-bnx2, firmware-bnx2x, firmware-ipw2x00, firmware-iwlwifi, firmware-qlogic, firmware-ralink. As part of that campaign we introduced firmware-linux-nonfree for various small firmware blobs that we had previously included in our kernel packages as part of a driver. It has subsequently collected more blobs used by newer versions of those drivers, and a few used by newer drivers. We've also added a few more specific packages since then; some per-manufacturer and some per-driver or per-driver-family: firmware-atheros, firmware-brcm80211, firmware-intelwimax, firmware-ivtv, firmware-netxen, firmware-realtek. We certainly need to keep some of the specific packages for size reasons or to satisfy a click-wrap licensing requirement. However, looking at these packages: Name Installed-Size Click-wrap? firmware-atheros 636 no firmware-bnx2 600 no firmware-bnx2x 1384 no firmware-brcm80211 168 no firmware-intelwimax 4084 no firmware-ipw2x00 1244 yes firmware-ivtv 892 yes firmware-iwlwifi 5316 no firmware-linux-nonfree 1164 no firmware-netxen 1812 no firmware-qlogic 1012 no firmware-ralink 104 no firmware-realtek 376 no I think we're splitting smaller than we really need to. If we merged all the packages with installed-size < 1000 and no click-wrap into firmware-linux-nonfree, we would have: firmware-bnx2x 1384 firmware-intelwimax 4084 firmware-ipw2x00 1244 firmware-ivtv 892 firmware-iwlwifi 5316 firmware-linux-nonfree 2808 firmware-netxen 1812 firmware-qlogic 1012 However, this may make upgrades tricky. Also, I think we have to stop listing files in the description of firmware-linux-nonfree as the description is far too long already. Can we assume users will find this package (or firmware-linux) without an 'apt-cache search' on the file name? Ben. -- Ben Hutchings It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
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