Re: General Resolution: non-free firmware: results
On Wed, 05 Oct 2022 at 16:34:27 +0200, Philip Hands wrote:
> I didn't want to inflict work on the debian-cd
> team, and I assume that nobody will object if volunteers turn up to help
> build/test the free images. If they're built and tested, I'm pretty sure
> they'll be published.
As one of the people who sometimes helps Steve to test CD releases (but
not a debian-cd team member):
I suspect that one of the motivations for not wanting two sets of images
on an equal footing is that building and testing images is a time- and
resource-intensive process: by its very nature, building and testing an
installation image or a live image involves shovelling a lot of data
around, and there's a policy of requiring at least the live images to
be tested on real hardware, because there have been cases in the past
where the images worked fine on a VM but failed on real hardware. Last
time we did bullseye and buster point releases, I left Steve's house
well after midnight, and I don't think that's atypical.
It would be a much less draining process if the combinatorial explosion
of things to test was smaller: at the moment we have netinsts, CDs,
DVDs, 16G images for USB sticks, Blu-Ray images, a live image per major
desktop environment (for some value of "major"), various paths through the
installer, amd64/i386, UEFI/BIOS, non-firmware/firmware and so on. Not
producing separate firmware and non-firmware images is one way to speed
this up by making the critical path shorter. I suspect the debian-cd
team might also be seriously considering discontinuing the larger
installation images like the Blu-Ray and 16G USB stick - certainly I
would be, if I was them.
So if volunteers turn up to help build/test images without non-free
firmware, I'm sure nobody is going to object to them doing that work,
but it might come with some limitations in order to take that work off the
critical path of building and testing the primary deliverable on release
day, which will now be the version with firmware: perhaps something like
"yes, but only after the primary images are ready" or "yes, but please
build only the most useful 1-3 variants per architecture" or something
along those lines.
smcv
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