Package: debian-installer Severity: normal X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-cd@lists.debian.org
A lot of work has happened in the firmware support department for Bullseye, as documented in #989863. In passing, Steve mentioned the “download archives of firmware packages” use case that we document in 6.4.1: https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/ch06s04.en The code changes implemented to widen firmware detection rely on supplemental information extracted from DEP-11 metadata, and ship alongside the included firmware packages, on the debian-cd side, only when building (unofficial) firmware-enabled images. To make sure we wouldn't disrupt anything on (official) main-only images, we shipped those `*.patterns` files in a `dep11` subdir of the `firmware` directory (again, only for firmware-enabled images). If we want to make it possible for people to complete their main-only installation image with files they would download separately, we would need those files to be shipped somewhere on the installation image, and/or to update those instructions. This would likely require code changes in any cases, since hw-detect prompts for extra storage devices from check-missing-firmware (in case firmware files were spotted as missing in dmesg), while the extra looking at `.patterns` files was implemented in the post-base-installer 50install-firmware hook. This didn't seem to be very high priority, and I didn't make it a blocker for 11.0; we can brainstorm what use cases we want to support and how, implement changes in D-I Bookworm Alpha releases, and maybe cherry-pick results in 11.n. Cheers, -- Cyril Brulebois (k...@debian.org) <https://debamax.com/> D-I release manager -- Release team member -- Freelance Consultant