Re: Bringing Mobian closer to Debian
Hi Arnaud,
On Thu, Sep 09, 2021 at 01:40:33PM +0200, Arnaud Ferraris wrote:
> 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).
That's in fact a good example where we can fix things upstream. Phosh
has a good idea about monitor properties nowadays so it won't be too
hard to pick a good default (and make user changes to that persistent)¹
so we avoid all guessing. I could also imagine a "quirks" database for
systems where this fails atm. We need something like that anyway for
notch support, etc.²
Cheers,
-- Guido
> > 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
>
¹) https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/phosh/-/issues/489
²) https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/phosh/-/issues/552
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