Hi, I'm not subscribed, please CC me. I'm adopting the firmware-ath9k-htc package, which has been FTBFS for a while but I've already found a sponsor and expect my fixes will be uploaded shortly [1]. These are some of the flagship chipsets for free wireless adapters, and although it's good that the firmware gets built from source in a separate package, until now it's been excluded from the installer and Debian installations. I've sent a MR for the latter [2], so I'd like to know how to best tackle the former. I think I can build a udeb of my package before the freeze, but I wasn't sure if it would be easiest for you to do something else, such as copy the firmware into your udeb. I'm not familiar at all with the firmware/d-i aspects of the kernel packages, which doesn't appear well documented to me in code comments or the manual, but I'm willing to put in the work to make Debian more usable with free software and hardware. One hiccup though is that the firmware is included in firmware-nonfree; to avoid a filename clash I rename mine to 'htc_*-1.dev.0.fw' and set the kernel option to use the "development" firmware. This option would probably need to be set outright, or else the module needs to be reloaded. If it's appropriate, I'd be good to do a migration where it can be removed from firmware-nonfree and firmware-ath9k-htc can take back the file name. After Bullseye I'd like to start chipping away at making the rest of the free firmware buildable from source [3], probably starting with the very similar carl9170, although I don't have hardware to test with and wonder if QEMU voodoo can make up for it. P.S. The reporter of [3] pointed out that, even if we're not building it from source, some of the firmware may be GPL and the Debian source packages do not ship the source code. Although I understand how meritocracy works, this does seem like a very serious problem which I'd like to mention in case you haven't considered. Thanks, John [1] https://mentors.debian.net/package/open-ath9k-htc-firmware/ [2] https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/firmware-free/-/merge_requests/1 [3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=890601#15
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