Re: Manually add firmware (or other) packages for installation?
John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 2/27/21 11:46 AM, Holger Wansing wrote:
>> John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote (Sat, 27 Feb 2021 11:21:58 +0100):
>>> The point is: We separate free and non-free images for a very reason and if
>>> you add a mechanism that just silently enables non-free on a system that
>>> was installed with the free installer, you are defeating this separation.
>>
>> 1. *I* do not do or change anything here. It's the case like this for ages!
>
> Of course, you are. You are sending in a patch.
But is that patch one that "silently enables non-free" and "taints"
the official installer? All I see it doing is giving expert users
more convenient access to the mechanism they can already use on the
console to get their hardware working properly.
If only we knew of a plausible use case for a kind of "additional
package" that someone might install this way *other* than firmware, I
suspect that would make this more palatable. The nearest I can think
of is that I hear tales of people setting up a local repo with a
"LAN-standard package-set" metapackage. Any takers?
>> 2. non-free does *NOT* be *silently* activated! The user is prompted for this,
>> and he needs to explicitly say YES to this option!
>> And this question is only be asked in expert installation mode.
>
> You are contradicting yourself. Earlier in the discussion you claim that the
> user just enters the name of the firmware packages and the installer does
> the rest of the work.
*If* the user has configured apt appropriately, it's already possible
to do this via a console. Holger's idea is that if people often need
to do that, the installer could just offer a dialog.
>>> The firmware issue isn't new and the stance has always been that we separate
>>> free and non-free installers for a very reason. People that use the free installers
>>> expect that the system installed contains DFSG-compatible components only.
>>
>> Firmware issues are not new, that's correct.
>> But with latest kernels, it seems that missing firmware for graphics cards
>> more often than in the past leads to a completely dark or garbled screen
>> (given the amount of user reports, I already mentioned).
>> I guess this is a result of some "policy changing" in the kernel, how to
>> act with firmware blobs and what to do, if firmware is missing (?).
>
> Well, people need to use the firmware installer in this case and looking through
> the on debian-devel, I'm not the only DD who takes this stance [1].
It has always been possible to use the official installer on a system
that's eventually going to need firmware, as long as you're willing to
fetch that firmware from the network, or a thumbdrive, or whatever.
It may be that we'd prefer such users to use the tainted installer (in
which case the signposts in that direction should really be more
prominent), but it isn't *compulsory*. After all, the user might have
already used the official installer on any number of workstations that
didn't need firmware. Oh, but here's one that has annoyingly ended up
with a different graphics card! So they can either go and get a whole
new set of CDs... or just use the tried-and-tested official installer
again but with a short detour via expert mode.
>>> A user wants all firmware to be available after installation, they are advised
>>> to use the non-free firmware installers.
>>
>> Again:
>> even if they decide to use this non-free installer with the graphics-card
>> firmware included, this installer *does*not* install the firmware for
>> graphics cards!
>> (leaving users with a unusable system at first boot.)
>
> Then you don't need to change debian-installer for that. Just adjust the package
> lists for the non-free CD.
I think Holger is saying that the process for detecting the need for
firmware is less effective than you're assuming. If so, putting more
non-free firmware on CDs won't help with this.
If the user installing Debian is going to have to install firmware at
some point, and you'd be willing to let them use a non-free installer,
I don't follow why you're so offended by the possibility that they'd
prefer to get as far as possible via the route that's less tainted
with non-freeness. They can use the official installer, but then add
that one graphics firmware package via apt. If your policy is that
the official installer should never make it possible to install any
software from outside main, even via expert mode, it seems odd that it
even *has* a package source configuration stage...
>> Only the "switch-to-second-console-and-install-there-by-hand" solution, you
>> mentioned already, can do this.
>>
>> This patch should only be a user-friendly variant of the above second-console
>> solution.
>
> I don't think we need this particular solution and I prefer to keep the free
> images untainted. We can adjust the package lists for the non-free CDs and
> have the firmware packages installed automatically.
The packages *on* the installer aren't the issue; I hope nobody's
asking for non-free software mixed-in on the official installer. If
anyone wants that, well, they know where to find Ubuntu.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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