Hi Steve (and everyone else),
> I'm proposing to change how we handle non-free firmware in
> Debian. I've written about this a few times already this year [1, 2]
> and I ran a session on the subject at DebConf [3].
>
> TL;DR: The way we deal with (non-free) firmware in Debian isn't
> great. For a long time we've got away without supporting and including
> (non-free) firmware on Debian systems. We don't *want* to have to
> provide (non-free) firmware to our users, and in an ideal world we
> wouldn't need to. However, it's no longer a sensible path when trying
> to support lots of common current hardware. Increasingly, modern
> computers don't function fully without these firmware blobs.
First, I want to thank you for your patience and dedicated in working on
all those difficult problems. The installer is a difficult piece of
software to master and work on, and I cannot imagine all the work you
have poured into this.
I particularly want to salute your work on making our users actually
capable of using more modern hardware. I think the proposal you bring up
(and the others that were added to the ballot) will really help move
this problem ahead. I'm actually quite happy with how the conversation
went so far, it seems we have matured quite a bit in our capacity in
handling difficult decisions such as this one.
> Since I started talking about this, Ansgar has already added dak
> support for a new, separate non-free-firmware component - see
> [4]. This makes part of my original proposal moot! More work is needed
> yet to make use of this support, but it's started! :-)
This, however, strikes me as odd: I would have expected this to be part
of the proposal, or at least discussed here, not implemented out of band
directly. I happen to think this is a rather questionable decision: I
would have prefered non-free to keep containing firmware images, for
example. Splitting that out into a different component will mean a lot
of our users setup will break (or at least stop receiving firmware
upgrades) unless they make manual changes to their sources.list going
forward. This feels like a regression.
In general, I feel we sometimes underestimate the impact of sources.list
changes to our users. I wish we would be more thoughtful about those
changes going forward. It seems like this ship has already sailed, of
course, but maybe we could be more careful about this in the future,
*especially* since we were planning on having a discussion on
debian-vote about that specific issue?
> I believe that there is reasonably wide support for changing what we
> do with non-free firmware. I see several possible paths forward, but
> as I've stated previously I don't want to be making the decision
> alone. I believe that the Debian project as a whole needs to make the
> decision on which path is the correct one.
Gulp, such a big jump! :) I personnally feel that we should make it
easier for people to install Debian, but I'm not quite sure I'm ready to
completely ditch the free images just yet. Maybe we could just promote
non-free images a little better, but I would much rather keep the free
images around. I guess that makes me a supporter of option "B", if I
understand correctly, but I am known for struggling with parsing GR
proposals. :)
Thanks again for all your work, and for everyone for having a (so far)
rather polite discussion on this possibly difficult topic.
a.
--
Time is a created thing. To say, "I don't have time" is like saying,
"I don't want to."
- Lao Tzu
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