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Firmware stuff - was systemd fight



On Sun, 2 Mar 2014, yaro@marupa.net wrote:

Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2014 03:05:20
From: yaro@marupa.net
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Four people decided the fate of debian with systemd. Bad faith
    likely
Resent-Date: Sun,  2 Mar 2014 19:21:09 +0000 (UTC)
Resent-From: debian-user@lists.debian.org

On Sunday, March 02, 2014 01:28:57 PM Doug wrote:
On 03/02/2014 02:02 AM, Scott Ferguson wrote:
On 02/03/14 16:53, yaro@marupa.net wrote:
On Sunday, March 02, 2014 04:25:13 PM Scott Ferguson wrote:
On 02/03/14 11:28, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
On Sun, 2014-03-02 at 10:55 +1100, Scott Ferguson wrote:

<snip>


The only arguments I've seen against systemd, at least in this thread is
either "it's change, and change is evil" and "Red Hat/Lennart did it, so it
must be bad." I think a lot of the resistance seems grounded in an irrational
hatred of corporate involvement in Linux. IT's VERY irrational given that a
huge portion, if not most of, the kernel itself is corporate code from
companies like Red Hat, IBM, Intel, Motorola, Google, HP, and even
Microsoft...

A significant portion of the drivers in the kernel tree are, themselves,
provided by the company that made the hardware in the first place. Drivers for
Intel GPUs on Linux ARE the official Intel-provided driver and are part of the
tree.

Strip away all corporate contributions and support and Linux really IS a hobby
OS no one can use for anything.

Conrad



Apart from the systemd fight stuff, I am wondering, in the context of the above message content, why a spearate firmware distribution of Debian Linux, needs to exist, rather than the firmware being included in the offical Debian version.

Also, and I do not know how applicable this is, to what is happening, I wonder why Debian does not provide backward compatibility with previous versions of Debian; why provision is not made, to allow software that runs on Debian 5, to run on Debian 6 and Debian 7.

As a single example, I have a multifunction printer, of which, the multifunctionality worked with Debian 5. Now, it is only a laser printer, running with Debian 6 - to use it to scan, I have to scan to a USB drive, and then copy the files to the computer, as Debian 6 (and, I believe, similarly, Debian 7) does not provide for the device to wotk with it, other than using a printer driver that is not for the particular model range, and, losing all other interfaced functionality.

Surely, it must be possible, to provide backward compatibility, to allow software that ran on earlier versions of Debian, to run on a current stable version?

--
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
  Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
  "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
  A Trilogy In Four Parts",
  written by Douglas Adams,
  published by Pan Books, 1992
....................................................


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