Debian's election season: old firmware and new contributors [LWN.net]

Debian's election season: old firmware and new contributors

Posted Oct 29, 2008 16:55 UTC (Wed) by joey (guest, #328)
Parent article: Debian's election season: old firmware and new contributors

> the Debian Project traditionally saves the firmware argument for the end
> of the release process. After all, they need to find some way to delay a
> release once it's looking close to ready.

Haha. What about all the work that has been done already during this release process to remove much firmware from the kernel, and to keep hardware using that firmware usable in the installer etc? Perhaps a vote is easier for LWN to report on than actual work being done.

Debian's election season: old firmware and new contributors

Posted Oct 29, 2008 17:24 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

So you haven't seen the flamewar currently going on on debian-devel? Some folks are objecting to the lenny-ignore tag added to bugs that refer to firmware that has not been removed.

Debian's election season: old firmware and new contributors

Posted Oct 29, 2008 18:37 UTC (Wed) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063) [Link] (1 responses)

Haha. What about all the work that has been done already during this release process to remove much firmware from the kernel, and to keep hardware using that firmware usable in the installer etc? Perhaps a vote is easier for LWN to report on than actual work being done.

The work on removing firmware from the kernel was mostly done by other people, and was reported by LWN when it happened. It seems like Debian was more interested in having votes about it, while others just got on with it.

Debian's election season: old firmware and new contributors

Posted Oct 30, 2008 8:02 UTC (Thu) by rhertzog (subscriber, #4671) [Link]

> The work on removing firmware from the kernel was mostly done by other people, and was reported by LWN when it happened. It seems like Debian was more interested in having votes about it, while others just got on with it.

While this is true for a part of the kernel work, it's not true when it comes to the debian-installer work (and Joey worked on this). d-i is now able detect that some of your hardware needs a non-free firmware and prompts you to provide them on some media (USB key for example) to get your hardware to work.

And this is important to not let users in the cold without a way to use their hardware.

Debian's election season: old firmware and new contributors

Posted Oct 30, 2008 8:50 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

Well, I find the remark hilarious and quite to the point of the way the Debian Developer Community handles these kinds of discussion. And I didn't read it the way as if John would have denigrated your work on the firmware issues -- which he reported on in the past here, when it happened. I think it was more about the regular tendency for flamewars about that topic on debian-devel.