Re: Firmware

[Joey Schulze <joey@infodrom.org>]

Luk Claes wrote:
> Hi
>
> As probably many of you know, the most heard criticism from users and  
> press on Lenny's release is lost hardware support because of missing  
> firmware. Users and press are complaining that their servers don't have  
> network anymore after an upgrade or that their notebooks cannot be  
> installed via wireless...
>
> It's of course possible to load firmware from extra media during  
> installation or install the right package (from non-free) when booting  
> back to an older kernel (to have network again) to be able to use the  
> network with the new kernel...
>
> What do people think of a new vote regarding the status of firmware? One  
> of the options can probably be Peter Palfrader's proposal [1].

I would rather like to keep binary firmware blobs outside of Debian/main
and maintain them in Debian/non-free with improved and easy ways to load
them during the installation.

We might require a new vote in order to release squeeze at some date.
We should be able to release squeeze even with non-free binary firmware
data included in the kernel.  However, we should rather try to move
these blobs into separate files (in Debian and upstream).  However,
this requirement should not keep us from releasing.

Regards,

	Joey

-- 
Still can't talk about what I can't talk about.  Sorry.  -- Bruce Schneier