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Re: Changing how we handle non-free firmware



Hey Antoine!

On Tue, Aug 30, 2022 at 11:33:15AM -0400, Antoine Beaupré wrote:

...

>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.

Yes, definitely! I've been very happy that we can talk about
potentially divisive topics in a reasonable fashion. :-)

>> 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.

So we'll need to advertise it well so that people pick these changes
up. That's important.

But I want to be *very* clear here that we *don't* want to enable the
whole of the non-free component for all users by default. That would
be a grave disservice, and I think Ansgar agrees with me. There's no
need to hold this back to be part of the GR here IMHO.

>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?

ACK, I understand.

>> 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. :)

Nod, that's fair! I proposed option A as my personal favourite for the
GR to remove (YA) possible point of confusion for our users, but I'm
definitely not blind to the size of the change that it makes for us.
Option B definitely sounds like a preferred option for some, and I'm
OK with that. :-)

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve@einval.com
"This dress doesn't reverse." -- Alden Spiess

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