I think all that's going to be said has been said. So I hereby propose the following resolution and immediately call for a vote.
1. The Technical Committee has considered the question of whether VESA fb support should be compiled into the default kernel, as requested in Bug#161931. 2. We have concluded that: * inclusion has significant benefits for some users, and * inclusion has no significant costs. Therefore, the VESA fb driver should be included. 3. In particular, we have considered the following supposed downsides to including the driver in the distribution kernel: a. That the increase in kernel size (while not significant for just VESA fb) due to including all other non-modular drivers in a similar position, would be significant and perhaps problematic for boot floppies etc. This question is difficult to analyse conclusively, but we feel it is largely unsubstantiated. If demand for many other similar drivers turns out to be similarly high, and including them is a problem, we are certainly prepared to make specific decisions in specific cases, and/or revisit VESA fb as part of a broader question. b. That the non-modularity of the VESA driver harms the kernel architecture. This is clearly relevant for a kernel architect, when choosing what drivers to include in a source tree. However, we do not feel that it is relevant when - as distributors - we consider which drivers to enable or disable. 4. Accordingly we request (or require, if the required supermajority is reached according to the Constitution) that the Debian kernel maintainers change the configuration to include the VESA fb driver in the default kernel, at their earliest convenience. Ian.