On Mon, Nov 03, 2008, Gunnar Wolf wrote: > I agree with you. But we cannot see them as part of our system, which > is mostly defined by its freedom. We can adjust our system to allow > you to load the firmware (probably under the name "drivers", to which > many people are more used) in a painless and intuitive fashion. But I > have yet to see a real reason (besides the work that must go into > sweeping them out of the current and future kernel tree - Thanks to > everybody involved into that!) for Debian to make the needed > exceptions to distribute them as part of main.
Your post made me see the issue under a different light: I must agree that this can't be considered on par with the rest of Debian so I wish we would distribute it while making clear that these particular files are not with accompanying source. Why not come up with a new system which would be more convenient than sections (or separate archives as you suggest)? e.g. trivial but not very flexible: /lib/no-source-code/firmwares/blah and a symlink /lib/firmware/foo -> /lib/no-source-code/firmwares/blah. Or a list of "not fully-free" files, provided by the packages themselves, e.g. /usr/share/doc/$pkg/btw-these-files-are-firmwares. Or complex, but might be cleaner: a new type of dpkg meta-information, just like we have conffiles, shlibs, we'd have "licensing" and would be able to express that /lib/firmware/foo is free to distribute but doesn't come with source code, and you probably don't care. I'm not happy that people would enable non-free on most systems just for the convenience of getting some files which most people will need and for which providing a source is not critical. Fetching them dynamically from $site isn't ok for live CDs, or when you actually try to provide the firmware to get network to work. :-/ -- Loïc Minier -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]