Re: Dealing with drivers that need firmware on the filesystem
Op ma, 10-01-2005 te 16:58 +0000, schreef Andrew Suffield:
> On Sun, Jan 09, 2005 at 07:51:58PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > > You also need to turn this question around and ask it the other way:
> > > does having these drivers in contrib actually hurt anything?
> >
> > Yes. It currently means that we can't ship an installer with support for
> > this hardware, because we don't use material from contrib and non-free
> > by default.
>
> Putting these drivers into main instead of contrib would not alter
> this, because it still wouldn't work without non-free. Any *practical*
> difference?
None, indeed.
I personally prefer the third idea. In fact, I had been thinking about
it myself; it's just that Matthew beat me to it.
AIUI, the people that want to see firmware blobs in main aren't actually
interested in having those blobs in main; what they are interested in,
is for Debian being able to provide an installer that supports the
hardware needing such blobs.
A section of the archive with the requirement that anything in it must
be redistributable on installation media (with the definition of those
'installation media' being "whatever the current implementation of
Debian's installer supports") would certainly help here. This kind of
compromise would allow us to build installer images using those drivers,
so those of us that want all non-free Software to burn in Hell would not
use any non-free software--not even accidentally--while those of us with
a more pragmatic way of looking at things will still actually have a
useful system.
--
EARTH
smog | bricks
AIR -- mud -- FIRE
soda water | tequila
WATER
-- with thanks to fortune
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