On Tue, 2008-10-21 at 10:38 -0700, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote: > On Tue, 2008-10-21 at 15:22 +0000, Anthony Towns wrote: > > Thomas: your continued inaction and unwillingness to code an acceptable > > solution to this issue, in spite of being aware of the problem since > > at least 2004 -- over four years ago! -- means we will continue to do > > releases with non-free software. > > I am *happy* to code an acceptable solution, but I regard "not support > the hardware for installation" as acceptable.
Luckily very few others do. Failing to support anything that was infact, supported by Etch, that isn't absolutely positively ancient, is a regression. > > I ask simply that the project's standards be *applied*, or that at the > very least, we have a resolution as we did before. And yes, I would > likely vote against it, as I did before. But in a democratic system, > people generally are well advised to accept the result of past votes > gracefully and work towards the next one. That's what I did; my vote > did not carry the day last time, and I have not objected about that > decision since. But I *do* object to the apparent new rule that the > ftpmasters and release engineers are now empowered to ignore DFSG > violations without any review by anyone else. > > And now we have people saying, "hey, let's exempt firmware from the > DFSG!" again, even though we have a GR on topic which decided that, no, > firmware counts. Shipping Lenny within a reasonable timeframe is more important than firmware. If the release managers feel that firmware bugs should be tagged lenny-ignore, than it is because they feel that fixing these bugs would likely delay the Lenny release too long. Note that Debian is already distributing this stuff in sid, so why give Lenny special treatment? If we waited for a release to be 100% perfect, it will likely take several more years. The good news is that the amount of inline firmware in the kernel is decreasing. So, eventually, all non-DFSG redistributable firmware can belong in firmware-nonfree. But that goal will simply not be realized before Lenny is released, if we intend to ship Lenny anytime soon. > > > "Hey, you've had four years; we're just going to keep releasing until > > you fix the bug." > > > > Hint: you're not being held hostage by anyone, seriously. You know how > > you can tell? Two words: Stockholm syndrome. > > So I can upload an NMU right now that fixes the problem? That will be > ok? If the NMU involves removing support for hardware, then no, the NMU's solution would be in my opinion unacceptable, and hopefully enough people agree that it would be rejected. The correct solution here would be to work with the kernel team and derive a list of acceptable goals that still result in Lenny being shipped in a reasonable timeframe. William
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