Hi Cyril,
The regression, in my opinion, is that the standard release of bullseye
made sure that all the packages that may be required for a successful
installation would be available for users who did not create their media
using 'dd', whereas bookworm doesn't.
Whereas one could use file system transposition with bullseyes to create
a working installation media for a UEFI system, the same is not true for
bookworm, as we now have .deb packages that are symbolically linked and
that will not be found unless the user takes care of manually
duplicating those, or copies the ISO through a utility that does.
Again, I will point out that the goal is for users of any OS to be able
to bypass the need to use any external utility (and I'll remind everyone
that Windows does not come with a native 'dd' equivalent for instance)
and just use the native tools that come with the OS to create a Debian
installation UEFI bootable media .
With bullseye, and to continue with the example of Windows, this was
possible by simply formatting a USB drive to FAT32 (which can be easily
achieved by right clicking on the drive or through the native disk
utility) then mounting the ISO in File Explorer (again right click, for
any version of Windows starting with Windows 8 included) and copying the
files to the USB drive.
If you did just that, you would end up with a media that, for all
intents and purposes, behaved the same as a 'dd' written media as far as
Debian installation was concerned (granted, there were still some Rock
Ridge symbolic links being lost, but those were for non essential files
like documentation, etc.).
With bookworm, doing the above no longer guarantees that the media will
result in an installable Debian, because if the user happens to require
a firmware, the relevant .deb package will be missing from /firmware due
to the use of symbolic links.
In my view, this counts as a regression (though, to be fair, non-free
bullseye is also affected by this issue, but I'm not entirely sure how
"standard" non-free is considered) on account that, whereas bullseye
stored all of the .deb packages required for installation as actual
physical files that could be copied over, bookworm does not.
I hope that clarifies it.
Regards,
/Pete
