This has really moved away from the question of providing
drivers/firmware to a "pissing contest" about whose philosophy the
default offerings should represent.
Presumably, FLOSS supporters are satisfied with the state of the current
ISOs, and https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=523 would address
extending install functionality without changing the content of the
existing ISOs, which should be an improvement over where we are now
without corrupting the FLOSS purity of the existing ISOs.
I think we should proceed with that approach, and leave the more
controversial question of whether the ISOs should be merged for another
day.
You can say what you like about newbies or "Aunt Edna", but anyone who
can find one ISO for themselves can find two, and the argument about how
the drivers/firmware wouldn't take up much space on the DVD goes both
ways, since downloading a separate ISO for them is then not that big a
deal in terms of bandwidth.
If you can't understand a reasonably verbose panel that says that "your
computer's hardware requires our secondary network/drivers/firmware
CD/DVD/ISO in order to activate networking", and says that you can find
it in the same place you got this disk, be that a network repository or
a friend who burned it for you, then you probably need to be reminded to
breathe. Such people are hardly about to be Mageia early-adopters, and
we have some time to discuss how we want to deal with them.
Eventually, we may agree to offer a merged ISO. Better still, since
anyone falling into the category of needing that much hand-holding is
unlikely to have bought a bare machine and is probably coming from
Windows, maybe we ought to provide a Windows app that checks the
hardware, downloads the needed ISOs to the Windows filesystem (on what
we assume is a working network-enabled system) after suitable prompts to
the user, and then enhance the install to look for them there.
