Re: Bringing Mobian closer to Debian
Hi,
Le 08/09/2021 à 11:30, Guido Günther a écrit :
>> As I wrote in my answer to Paul, I'm not sure this is feasible due to a
>> lack of legal information on that matter. Still something to
>> investigate, though.
>
> Could something similar to fw-cutter¹ help so users can extract it
> from existing images so avoid distribution problems?
This could definitely help for Android devices, yes. Camera firmwares
are another aspect of it needing further research.
> I think merging mobian-*-tweaks enhancements into the mobile-tweaks
> source package would be a great to help Debian to support these devices
> better and help lowering the Debian <-> Mobian delta. We have device
> specific udev rules, gesttings, etc in there.
Agreed, I'll work on that in the coming weeks.
> It will get hairy if get different device specific requirements for the
> mobile environment that runs on top but i hope we can avoid
> this. (e.g. phosh specific setting are in phosh-mobile-tweaks but
> they're not meant to be device specific).
It might get tricky, but as long as we can avoid conflicts this should
be mostly fine (for example, I don't expect shipping a device-specific
phoc.ini to set scaling right would be a problem when other environments
are available in Debian).
> Regarding '<device>-support': From looking at the package it seems they
> add 3 things
>
> 1. device specific kernel
> 2. device specific firmware
> 3. device specific <device>-tweaks package
>
> Instead of using another layer of packages We could handle that via the
> installer since it's a one time thing when either installing the device
> with d-i or or when creating an image to be flashed to the device (via
> e.g. debos, fai). d-i has support for figuring out firmware based on
> modalias and maybe we need to extend this with DT support or come up
> with a tool that can be used for other image creation methods as well
> and then reused by d-i?
This approach has pros and cons:
+ it definitely makes things easier to manage
- we can't automatically deploy new dependencies should a new package be
needed (or drop deprecated packages so they can be autoremoved)
It's basically fine once a device support is fully mature, but we're not
there yet, I believe.
Combined with Federico's suggestion of having a single tweaks package
able to detect the underlying device and ask questions to the user, this
could very well be the best approach in the long term, however.
Cheers,
Arnaud
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