On Mon, Apr 01, 2024 at 06:27:29PM +0200, Vincent Bernat wrote:

On 2024-04-01 18:05, Jonathan Carter wrote:

The included firmware contributed to Debian 12 being a huge success,
but it wasn't the only factor.

Unfortunately, the shipped firmwares are now almost a year old, including
for unstable. I am following the progress since quite a few years and I have seen many possible contributors trying to help and fail. The current situation is that Debian does not work well with recent AMD-based laptops
due to firmware being too old. Therefore, we are back at users trying to update the firmware by copying them from random places (as for myself, I am using the deb generated by upstream's Makefile).

My personal impression is that we are repeating a common scheme in Debian: maintainers don't have time to move forward due to the task being
non-trivial for reasons of our own, people are proposing to help (6 people
in [1]), but this is ignored by the maintainers as they don't have time.

[1]: https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/firmware-nonfree/-/merge_requests

Why is updating the firmware packages not trivial? Is it because of
licensing issues? I always thought it's just copying a bunch of files from
the linux-firmware repo (but I also often wondered why is the package
often not up to date).

--
WBR, wRAR

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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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Le lundi, 1 avril 2024, 19.41:45 h CEST Andrey Rakhmatullin a écrit :

Why is updating the firmware packages not trivial? Is it because of
licensing issues? I always thought it's just copying a bunch of files from the linux-firmware repo (but I also often wondered why is the package
often not up to date).

My recollection, after getting some MRs merged in the firmware-nonfree package last cycle (oh, a year gone already), is that it's a mix of:

* the maintainers in position to review, then merge the proposed changes are few, and have plenty on their hands;

* firmware packages seem to have lower priority during the development cycle, in favour of larger updated shortly-before (or during) the freeze;

* upstream and Debian (maintainers) are not in complete agreement on what can, or should be shipped in packages; from README.source:

Also, some of its contents are not clearly redistributable, and some are obsolete for Debian's purposes.

So almost every file addition needs a careful `git log` review to check for origin, updates, reasoning, version strings, etc. Unless there's tooling I have not found; it's tedious, error-prone (and not very interesting) work (although quite arguably necessary).

* packaging is very smart, but peculiar (or at least, quite different to what I had been used to before I touched it). Despite good documentation, it's quite a steep intro for newcomers.

All-in-all, I think it's an all-too-classical case of "we don't have enough humanpower for the job we set out to do". Add a team of motivated individuals to gain the confidence of the existing "already-plenty-on-their-plates maintainers", to then maintain the package on their own. Oh, wait…

--
OdyX
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