On Sun, Jan 02, 2005 at 01:27:21AM +0100, Måns Rullgård wrote: > Some Alpha systems (I forgot which) came with only the inferior > AlphaBIOS installed in flash. Later, an SRM version for this system > was released, and installing this is generally considered a good > thing. These firmwares required different boot loaders, and > different kernel configurations, so a boot loader or kernel package > could reasonably have some sort of dependency on one of the > firmwares.
Stretching that line of thinking, a VGA driver "depends" on a card with a VGA BIOS. And I had once a card with a flashable VGA BIOS. And I had to flash it once because the Linux driver wouldn't work with the older one (anymore IIRC)... Unless you are saying that you have to reload the firmware each time you boot the machine (and I know you aren't because I had one of those at some point), I hope that you can understand that you have to modify the machine in order to use a particular piece of software, because that particular piece of software requires that particular machine. IOW, we could can the entire <pick one you don't like much> port because it depends on <foo> present on machine <bar>, <foo> being a BIOS, a certain chipset, a certain controller, a certain graphics card, or whatever else you wish. Darn! That's all of them. IMO we have to draw the line at some point that's *useful* and *practical*. Committing suicide is neither of those. I think the proposal that spawned this subthread is both. Marcelo
