Re: Bringing Mobian closer to Debian
Hi Paul,
Le 14/08/2021 à 15:09, Paul Wise a écrit :
> On Sat, Aug 14, 2021 at 11:08 AM Arnaud Ferraris wrote:
>
>> 1. packages already in Debian with a few additional patches for
>> improving the user experience on mobile devices (mostly GNOME apps
>> such as evince, gedit or gnome-contacts)
>> 2. kernel and bootloader packages including out-of-tree patches
>> 3. non-free binary firmwares
>
> I expect all/most of these changes should go upstream and reach Debian
> via new package releases.
Over time they probably will indeed, so I'm not worried about those.
>> 4. Mobian base metapackages (meta-mobian) and customizations
>> (mobian-tweaks) [4]
>> 5. device-specific metapackages ($device-support) and customizations
>> (mobian-$device-tweaks) [5]
>
> What kind of things do these contain?
Mostly scripts and config files, to give just a few examples:
- systemd config file fragments (journal size, power key handling...)
- script + systemd service for configuring a USB gadget (net + serial)
through configfs
- initramfs scripts & hooks
- device-specific udev rules
> Source packages in main can produce binary packages in contrib, so
> probably the way to go would be one mobile-something source package
> that builds all the binary packages needed and puts them in the right
> main/contrib component.
Good to know, thanks!
>> custom kernels
>
> Perhaps these could go to experimental?
I'm not sure experimental is fundamentally better than a separate Mobian
repo for those packages
> Those should be added to Debian non-free, unless they aren't
> redistributable, if they aren't then Mobian are presumably also
> affected by that.
Well that's part of the problem: some of those firmwares "magically"
popped on the internet, without anyone being able to tell the license
and whether they're actually redistributable, so they'll probably stick
to the mobian repo for a while.
For the OnePlus 6 and Poco F1 we also have binary blobs extracted from
the devices' vendor partition, I'm not sure the legal implications of
extracting and distributing those files.
>> [5] https://gitlab.com/mobian1/devices
>
> This doesn't seem to be public, I get a password auth trying to clone it.
It's not a single repo, but a gitlab sub-group for device-specific
packages, such as:
- https://gitlab.com/mobian1/devices/sunxi64-linux
- https://gitlab.com/mobian1/devices/firmware-oneplus6
- https://gitlab.com/mobian1/devices/pinetab-tweaks
- and so on...
>> [6] https://salsa.debian.org/DebianOnMobile-team/mobile-tweaks
>
> Many of these seem like they should go upstream to glib2.0, gpsd,
> systemd/udev, u-boot, Firefox, Qt, GNOME etc.
Part of those might be upstreamed indeed, although I doubt it'll happen
for all those tweaks, and it might be a multi-years long process, which
is why I believe we should have such packages in Debian for the time being.
> According to the systemd documentation for /etc/machine-info, CHASSIS
> is a workaround for buggy firmware, so it sounds like
> u-boot/grub2/something need fixing?
I assume it mostly works on UEFI-based system, but I doubt it'll ever be
the case on ARM-based machines, unless we make it a device-tree
property? Maybe Guido has more insight about that point.
>
> The source for adwaita-phone.jpg, adwaita-phone.blend, seems to be
> missing from git, which I guess could be a DFSG item 2 violation.
Good point, I'll open a bug against mobile-tweaks for that, thanks!
> BTW, are you planning on packaging libusbgx, gadget-tool and gadgetd
> for Debian? They provide a less fiddly experience for setting up USB
> gadgets. We need help with them upstream though. gadgetd was abandoned
> by Samsung/Tizen as they integrated more restricted functionality into
> their init system, but I think it could be useful for mobile user
> interfaces that could contact it over DBus.
Once this (and some other bits) is sorted out, this might be something I
could work on, yes. (no promise though, I don't know when I'll have time
for that)
Cheers,
Arnaud
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