Re: LCC and blobs
> On Thu, 6 Jan 2005, Josh Triplett wrote:
> > If the firmware we have packaged in non-free comes standard on the
> > device, then the driver does not need a copy of the firmware, so it does
> > not have a dependency on it.
On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 06:21:52PM -0800, Ken Arromdee wrote:
> Hm? The driver does need a copy of the firmware. It needs a copy that is
> present on the device.
The driver doesn't need the firmware .deb file.
The driver doesn't even need to know whether any such file exists.
For that matter, the driver doesn't need to know whether or not there
are devices which have different firmware, no firmware or whatever.
> And of course there's the absurd situation where a manufacturer decides to
> move firmware from a device from a ROM to a CD and Debian suddenly cannot
> provide a driver for it....
Huh?
Manufacturer releases some new piece of hardware (which doesn't work
like the old hardware, even though it shares some hardware elements),
and it's absurd that Debian can't provide a driver for it?
How is this absurd? For that matter, how is that even the situation?
Most likely, Debian IS able to provide a driver for it. Well, unless
we can't figure out how to pull the firmware off that cd and feed it to
the hardware.
Most likely it's the new driver isn't exactly the same as the previous
driver (because now the driver has to support downloading the firmware,
and it didn't have to do that before).
There's a significant chance that the new driver is in contrib (because
it's your hypothetical example, so I'm presuming that that's what you're
trying to make happen).
But the only thing that's absurd is claiming that it's the same piece
of hardware. If it was the same piece of hardware, the old driver would
continue to work, and Debian would have no problem providing that driver.
--
Raul
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