new archive section: non-free-firmware

[Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de>]

Some news for you who are running unstable or testing/bookworm and have
firmware packages installed from non-free (most users who do not run
Debian in a VM probably have): these firmware packages are being moved
to a new section non-free-firmware, and you should update your
sources.list(5) entries to include that section to keep them up to date.

In unstable this is already happening, and aptitude just informed me
that two installed firmware-* packages have become obsolete, i.e. are no
longer available from non-free.  In bookworm, non-free-firmware is
currently still empty, but that will change in the coming days and weeks.

To use the new section, edit sources.list like this:

before:
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

after:
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

and similar for testing or bookworm instead of unstable.

If you have aptitude installed[1], the following command gives you a
list of installed packages from non-free:

$ aptitude search -F %p --disable-columns '~i~snon-free

If that list only includes packages matching "firmware", you can remove
non-free from your sources.list once the transition of firmware packages
to the new section is complete.

For more information why this was done, read
https://www.debian.org/vote/2022/vote_003.

Cheers,
       Sven


1. If somebody knows a similar command in apt, please post it.