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Re: Changing how we handle non-free firmware



On Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 12:29:42PM +0200, Ansgar wrote:
> On Fri, 2022-08-19 at 12:19 +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 18, 2022 at 08:58:21PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> > > system will *also* be configured to use the non-free-firmware
> > > component by default in the apt sources.list file.
> > 
> > What's the rationale for this one?
> > 
> > I think it would make more sense to only configure the system to enable
> > the non-free-firmware component if the installer determines that
> > packages from that component are useful for the running system (or if
> > the user explicitly asked to do so).
> 
> I think this would be confusing: detachable hardware (e.g., USB
> devices) would work or not work depending on whether it was connected
> at installation time. At least for amd64 it wouldn't make a different
> either way due to the microcode firmware packages.
> 
> For the same reason the system should probably install all (reasonable)
> firmware by default, just like we install all kernel drivers even for
> devices that are not present on the target system.
> 
openSUSE has this clever system that hooks into zypper (their apt
equivalent) to install the firmware package on demand if a matching PCI
ID is found (presumably USB device identifiers too, but I'm not sure).

This could be a nice longer-term solution? In the shorter term, for
another distro comparison, Fedora does what Ansgar suggests and just
preinstalls a lot of firmware.

Best regards,

-- 
Michel Alexandre Salim
identities: https://keyoxide.org/5dce2e7e9c3b1cffd335c1d78b229d2f7ccc04f2

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