Hi all,

While firmware is the most important category of software not available
in Debian main needed by Debian users at install time, there are others.

Some that I can think of are drivers and accessibility aids, for eg:

The broadcom-sta-dkms Broadcom WiFi driver is only in non-free.

The mbrola-af1 Afrikaans voice is in non-free and the mbrola text to
speech system that uses it is in contrib.

There are probably situations where non-redistributable firmware or
software is required at install time, but is available for download or available from the preinstalled OS on a device. I have the impression
that Android devices and Apple M1/M2 are examples of the latter.

There are many Android devices where non-redistributable non-Linux
software or services are required to unlock or jailbreak a device
before the Debian installer can be run.

There are always going to be situations where non-main software is
required to enable installation or usage of Debian. Constraining the
use of non-main software within the installer to firmware only means
that installation is not possible for some people. On the other hand
for some people acceptability of non-free software ends at firmware.
Other people prefer to not use non-free firmware either. Other people
choose features no matter what license they come under[1].

So there are a continuum of needs for non-free software.

Currently Debian is supporting only two groups, proposing to drop one
of those groups and neglecting some other groups.

Debian could instead aim to increase the set of people who are served
by our installation tools and distribution. That would entail keeping
the current free installer, altering the existing non-free installer to
only install firmware, adding additional non-free installers and
additional tools for other operating systems.

Of course there are likely not enough volunteers to work on these
issues, so this mail serves mainly to reframe the discussion to orient
it within the wider spectrum of opinions on non-free software and wider
range of issues that people face installing or using Debian.

1. I expect Debian lost a lot of gaming users to distros that install
   the non-free nvidia driver by default where needed.

--
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

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On Sat, Sep 10, 2022 at 08:51:21AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:

Hi all,

While firmware is the most important category of software not available
in Debian main needed by Debian users at install time, there are others.

Hi Paul,

I think there's a couple of issues here that need untangling.

As you say, there's a spectrum of needs and users:

Some people - including participants in this discussion - are content
to have a system with no extra firmware loadable. Other people are
happy to have all firmware, firmware updates from a manufacturer -
and all shades in between.

This GR is essentially about
* whether we should include non-free firmware in an installer produced by
the media team for Debian

* what precedence we should give that and whether we should continue to
produce an installer with no non-free firmware in addition

Moving software to a new nonfree-firmware section means that we can be
more clear about what is firmware and what is not. In some sense, nothing changes - Debian has always supported freedom and also its users. We can
be honest that firmware is often required and that not all software is
under our control - that's a necessary point to make.

Whether this changes the SC at this point is probably a better subject
for another GR in due course. It would be good and useful to make
this GR as simple as possible and no simpler.

Multiplying installers might be a complexity too far at this or any other stage.

With all the very best, as ever,

Andy Cater

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Hi,

On 9/10/22 11:37, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

Multiplying installers might be a complexity too far at this or any other stage.

We already multiply installers along several axes. Most of these work by
simply selecting different file sets and detecting at runtime whether a specific file is present or has to be retrieved, this would likely work
here as well except for "very early" firmware.

For those, we need a mechanism to decide what is "very early" anyway,
because it needs to go into the initramfs in order to be available
before the installer has found itself, and we need to be selective about
that because initramfs size is a huge issue already.

For all the normal firmware packages, we also need to have a
netinst/regular split anyway, regardless of whether we want separate installers, and we need a mechanism to extract only what is necessary
into the initramfs, or we increase the installer memory requirements yet
again.

So having additional installers is the smallest technical challenge here.

Simon

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