Re: Changing how we handle non-free firmware
On 2022-08-30 21:11:07, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> Hey Antoine!
>
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2022 at 11:33:15AM -0400, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
[...]
>>> 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.
Yeah, so I think that's a great advantage of splitting firmware out of
non-free: it keeps the "non-free blast radius" to a minimum, just to
make sure people can get their hardware working without getting all that
other stuff that they should really opt into.
Yet I actually use non-free for other stuff as well, at a personal
level. Things like documentation, for example, often end up in non-free
for $reasons and I have non-free enabled for *both* this and firmware.
In that sense, why wasn't it possible to have (say) non-free/firmware as
a component, so that when you opt-in to non-free you *also* get
firmware? That would have been a backwards-compatible change...
Thanks for the response,
a.
--
That's the kind of society I want to build. I want a guarantee - with
physics and mathematics, not with laws - that we can give ourselves
real privacy of personal communications.
- John Gilmore
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