What should Debian do about firmware?

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Hein Zelle · #31 Post by **Hein Zelle** » 2006-08-30 07:54

I've voted to allow the firmware in main, but I also want to add the remark that I hope the modifications to the debian installer will be high on the priority list for the next debian release.

Jeroen · #32 Post by **Jeroen** » 2006-08-30 09:25

Lavene wrote:Anyone know the actual estimate for the delay it would cause?

6 months of real and steady work (unsure how many people are actually willing to undertake this huge task, that's a different issue):
http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/200 ... 00122.html

The above mail is by Joey Hess, who was the debian-installer release manager from very early on until recently, and one of the most significant contributors to it, if not the most significant.

Lavene · #33 Post by **Lavene** » 2006-08-30 10:14

Jeroen wrote:6 months of real and steady work (unsure how many people are actually willing to undertake this huge task, that's a different issue):
http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/200 ... 00122.html

The above mail is by Joey Hess, who was the debian-installer release manager from very early on until recently, and one of the most significant contributors to it, if not the most significant.

So six months minimum. Which probably translates into a year or more realisticly. That changes a few things...

I didn't realize it was such a mammoth task, but the fact that it is kinda renders the questions in the polls completly uninteresting since in reality it's only leave one alternative;
I doubt it's even possible to delay Etch another six months to a year without affectivly commit distro suicide. And simply drop all support for quite a deal of hardware by dumping it from main without making it available in non-free is equally destructive.
As I see it the only possible solution for Etch is to leave it in main and then address the problem *in time* for it to be resolved before the release of Etch+1.

I still wish it was in non-free though

Tina

THR4K · #34 Post by **THR4K** » 2006-08-30 11:56

Lavene wrote:I doubt it's even possible to delay Etch another six months to a year without affectivly commit distro suicide. And simply drop all support for quite a deal of hardware by dumping it from main without making it available in non-free is equally destructive.
As I see it the only possible solution for Etch is to leave it in main and then address the problem *in time* for it to be resolved before the release of Etch+1.

I still wish it was in non-free though

Tina

I Agree with your point of view. It resume well all i said previously.

The countdown for Etch is now about 4 months approximatively, so delaying it for fall 2007 or in the course of 2008 will be a big mistake. Because the amount of work for kernel-related packages will simply need too much time, it is better to planned them for Etch+1.

For me fighting for an ideal of freedom is great, but it becomes only benefic to all if the goals are realistic, even at the cost of few compromise sometimes.

rickh · #35 Post by **rickh** » 2006-08-30 14:14

Yeah, 6 months to a year is a pretty big bullet to bite. I would not be surprised to see some delay in the Etch release anyway, based on the fact that the conversion from XFree86 to Xorg seems to still be causing a lot of grief.

If anyone is systematically moving unsourced firmware and drivers from main to non-free, I would hope they're working backward from the most recent. I suspect that the newer hardware gets the most use, and if there is old stuff still in main that noone uses anyway, it's reminiscent of the falling tree in the forest.

DeanLinkous · #36 Post by **DeanLinkous** » 2006-08-30 15:40

Lavene wrote: I still wish it was in non-free though

Tina

I think I would like to agree with that but since it is Lavene I am seriously rethinking my decision.

Bulkley · #37 Post by **Bulkley** » 2006-08-30 17:39

I confess that I'm having a tough time understanding this issue, even after reading the original attachment. I think that Debian should be pure, as no other distro is. I've used bleeding edge distros and suffered. It seems better that Debian maintain its standards.

The un-sourced issue is one that I have wondered about for a long time. Why isn't there an un-approved source that those who want can add to their /apt/sources.list? Things like Nvidia drivers and other proprietary programs could be in it. By keeping this stuff separate, Debian could remain pure for those who wish it, and those who can accept a contaminated distro can do so easily.

But, as I say, I don't understand this.

emmanuel_halbwachs · #38 Post by **emmanuel_halbwachs** » 2006-08-30 22:12

OK for firmware in main for etch, but in non-free for etch+1, with an
upgrade path that gives you the choice (and some bits of explanation).

ldoolitt · #39 Post by **ldoolitt** » 2006-08-31 19:51

The alternatives seem bogus to me.
My compromise suggestion (details now posted at
http://doolittle.icarus.com/~larry/fwin ... .6.17.html)
is to list the 45 files left over from sarge as temporary acceptable.
This avoids regressions on both the kernel functionality and the
amount of sourceless firmware in Debian main. The required delay
for etch should be minor.

ldoolitt · #40 Post by **ldoolitt** » 2006-09-01 04:00

yoush wrote:
Firmware is different because it runs not on a general-purpose computer, but on a specialized processor embedded into peripherial device.

Does your attitude change when the peripheral device has read/write access to the main computer's address space? Like a bus-mastering PCI SCSI controller?

yoush wrote: Environment needed to develop firmware is much less common, and often not accessible for general public for different reasons.

apt-get install sdcc
(for at least some of the code in question)

yoush wrote: And there are much less people that have proper knowledge to develop firmware, compared to PC software.

So? And denying people the source code to the firmware is supposed to help the situation?

yoush wrote: So 'free firmware' is something that just won't happen.

Care to explain the 15 times it has _already_ happened in the Linux kernel?

cornofulgur · #41 Post by **cornofulgur** » 2006-09-03 10:09

Please keep the firmwares in main and support them the better the best, with or without sources.
Please contact the manufacturers to clarify all the situation.
Please respect the choices of the respectables upstream teams, Linux kernel hackers, FSF documentation writers.
Please make Debian distro free for programs only and don't check licence for texts, docs, sounds, graphics, hardwares, fonts, datas...
Please we want more and more free programs, we don't need less and less non-free non-programs, stop eradicating packages, stop the debian purges.
Please let the debian-installer team work on tasks they estimates usefull otherwise we're on the way of a fork.
Please drop the non-free branch because it becomes more and more a tool that terrorizes packagers.
Please please please atomize all these d-l trolls.
And thank you.

Anonymous Coward · #42 Post by **Anonymous Coward** » 2006-09-03 19:28

Jeroen wrote:What is the most important for the release of Etch?

I voted to throw non-free binaries away from main. I'm a Debian user since more than a year and I'm very surprised to learn now that Debian isn't the free distribution I thought.

I personnaly really don't care about the release date since I already use Etch, but I don't understand the problem with the installer : isn't it possible to put right now the kernel in non-free and install this non-free kernel until a cleaned version is available ?

( And in the meantime, it would be nice to learn how to build a really free version of the kernel. )

Anonymous Coward · #43 Post by **Anonymous Coward** » 2006-09-03 19:54

[quote="Anonymous Coward"]I voted to throw non-free binaries away from main.[/quote]

Apologies.

I just realize I made an awful mistake and voted for the contrary (answer 1) and don't know if I can correct it.

In fact, I also realize that the question is non-neutral and I can't answer it :
1. I don't want non-free binaries in main.
2. I don't want Debian to "drop support for hardware which requires sourceless firmware".
3. I don't care about the date of the release but it seems to me that it would be possible to put the whole kernel in non-free and loading it from there.

Jeroen · #44 Post by **Jeroen** » 2006-09-04 00:23

We cannot put the 'whole kernel' in non-free: that's effectively make Debian unusable without actually having non-free in your sources.list.

Also, as noted above in the mail from Joey Hess I referred to (please do read it), debian-installer doesn't actually support multiple sources of packages yet. The debian-installer people are very clear in that supporting loading some stuff from non-free is something that will delay the etch release with certainty, the only unknown factor is by how much.

Note that your last post isn't neutral either: "sourceless" does not imply "non-free": this is one of the core things debian developers amongst themselves and others also disagree about: some do believe this implication holds, others believe it only holds when talking about program code running on the main CPU instead of software running on perhipials (==firmware), and there are various views that are somewhere in between those two extremes. I won't repeat here the arguments for either case, they are stated on lots of places already.

As to changing your vote, that's not possible: individual votes are not stored, so it's not possible to verify you actually really voted #1, and deduct one vote there and add a vote to your intended option: this would be a loophole for poll cheating.

leech · #45 Post by **leech** » 2006-09-04 20:37

I voted for leaving them in Main, and just releasing Etch on time. I recently ran into this problem first hand. I installed Debian on my Laptop, which had Ubuntu before. Ubuntu detected all my supported hardware and set it up nicely, but what can I say, I'm a debian guy at heart. When I installed with the Debian Etch beta 3 mini.iso on my laptop, I installed through the gigabit nic on it. But then when trying to get my wireless card (ipw2200 module, which has the source code for everything, but doesn't have the firmware anywhere in Debian at all, the ipw2200-source package is in contrib.)

Network card and SCSI or IDE cards are important to have support for in Main. Especially for servers, where sometimes they won't have floppy drives in them, and if you can't get the network devices or the hard drives to be detected.... well the administrator would be forced to use a different distribution.

I'm all for free, but in my opinion, if you are so anal about everything being open sourced as well as free, then that's not really 'freedom' for others, is it?

Leech

darkphoenix939 · #46 Post by **darkphoenix939** » 2006-09-17 02:31

why not make the changes in the usual debian way i have seen big changes go threw ... experimental > unstable > testing > and next the stable after this one. but to be delayed 6 + months extra when the next stable is almost ready and have betas out for it? i say wait until the next release and put the changes threw the usual debian way but making sure the changes are ready before the next stable after this one. either way for most it should not matter right? 70 somthing % of us use sid? but still let it be ready for the next release after this one.

ajdlinux · #47 Post by **ajdlinux** » 2006-09-17 04:39

darkphoenix939 wrote: either way for most it should not matter right? 70 somthing % of us use sid?

Maybe 70% of desktop users. Certainly not 70% of Debian users - probably around 70% of all Debian installations are servers, and 95% of those run stable.

Jeroen · #48 Post by **Jeroen** » 2006-09-23 09:22

ajdlinux wrote:Maybe 70% of desktop users. Certainly not 70% of Debian users - probably around 70% of all Debian installations are servers, and 95% of those run stable.

Do you have any creadible reference for these statistics? By using percentages you suggest knowing it by some kind of certainty, but I've never seen numbers like this.

ajdlinux · #49 Post by **ajdlinux** » 2006-09-23 09:30

No, they're just out of thin air; but I suspect that's rather close to the actual number - Debian is very popular as a server distro: according to NetCraft it has over 1.2 million active websites as of Dec 2005 - and I wouldn't really think most of those 1.2m would run Etch or Sid.

mnorwick · #50 Post by **mnorwick** » 2006-09-26 21:25

I'm somewhat purist so voting to delay seems like a logical choice. Putting proprietary, closed-source firmware in main breaks the philosophy of having main, contrib, and non-free. Considering the problems I just had trying to install Etch from 'testing' it is not ready for prime time anyway.

Michael

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What should Debian do about firmware?

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