-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 First of all, thanks for having this discussion. I think it is a serious problem. Debian is currently hard to install on many machines, and I very much dislike the idea of telling people to enable all of non-free because of some hardware. Installing a package manually and then no longer updating is also not a good idea (even though it is unlikely that we can fix much in those packages, it's just wrong to keep them out of the automatic update process).
On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 03:54:56PM +0200, Jan Hauke Rahm wrote: > On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 01:15:21PM +0200, Paul Wise wrote: > > non-free/docs > > non-free/firmware > > non-free/drivers > > non-free/web > > non-free/comm > > non-free/formats > > non-free/apps > > I don't care much for making this more complicated, but splitting > non-free may find many (even reasonable) metrics to do so. What you're describing is debtags. For users who want that sort of control, it may be useful to add functionality to apt to hide packages that match some rule involving debtags. It will download the full package list, but it only presents what the user chose to see. On the other hand, if I see the above list, it seems like splitting non-free into the sections it already has might also be an idea. My guess is no split in the archive is really needed for that; instead, we'd need to have some way to download a package list of one section at a time. In other words, sources.list should be able to include something like: deb http://http.debian.net unstable main non-free/kernel My guess is that this is also relatively easy to implement, but I haven't looked at the code at all, so I may be wrong about that. > Think of some package with a non-commercial clause in its otherwise free > license. Many of our users are non-commercial and could use > non-free/non-commercial. Or think of those non-military/non-evil licenses > which (almost) any private citizen and even many companies could use. Everything in non-free can be used by people, otherwise we couldn't distribute it. If people want to only not use things they aren't allowed to use, they should enable all of non-free and read the licenses. The debtags approach I described above may help (and even without apt helping, users can use debtags to find their packages). About the installation media: I agree that they are part of main, and therefore should not contain the firmware. On the other hand, I think it is important that it is easy for users to install Debian and on many systems that is not currently the case. A firmware bundle that is automatically detected at installer boot seems like a good option to me. I also didn't know those existed, and so I don't know how easy it is to use them. I don't think messages are particularly important; users will ignore them anyway, and by downloading and preparing the firmware bundle they have already indicated that they want to use it. I'm opposed to more messages than usual, otherwise the Windows-effect of users not reading them and just clicking Ok, Agree, Continue will happen. There should of course be a message at the download link of the bundle, but no "I Agree"-button IMO. We're trying to help them, not annoy them. Finally, I think we should advertize those bundles. We should be clear that they are non-free and therefore not part of Debian, but also that they may need them. We even say in our SC that we don't have a problem with people who need non-free things, so we shouldn't make life hard for them by hiding things that we know they need. Thanks, Bas -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJV4cNSAAoJEJzRfVgHwHE6+aoP/3ewjv7T+KmzWNLZrvxJqGmN o3Ux79iPGwtKzhFYivblJ3fKh49fKvaT2ml6dwHB22Rof+sLrmkl/kS39++uja19 nx0vyT30cWhb+cxA8NNlNk/1aotUkGnRQS8TcJOSg9Qc2cvPOUFA9Kc9Dqycqd7N WHxREZy1h1OLtTm3FpCSZtuZO3GC7D9RcE+QJAsAHQFjD/eRfkxcDtpTEGYoYcMz gfzCHAb45mKI1UUy3CSXYNDlmle/jRYG7A5SUDJIUjgwUk3KJEv2zSrxORQ9NTAm 3bTFRg8lFfJJp7v98IAb0uktl60ei1ALBp8YfORY/FWQN2zl+f/GMbHrlEV6I2Cm EdJKOq1OsiFeIE6tq71V3W0rfbggBAwSJtqmnFRrN3VzLcYreClWAS8qaw6soKbv B/ryWztJq74KoDjtxUcGcXrXpXFjoSwYxyS8JxAtgEw1hYnnd87qIY+WT7lXTxfD J0l69brCcvgKdqO67mBbQp/CWAta1FJaTVhY7EYpYdYzpyzp2xUOSrKDwQtFu09g 9dzLV2YxyOunDSbAm1Q6qctBuihC9+ClQ1vJ0euJ3lDIWXO3lzvkrOPloEo9T5qK 3lP8x579GBpywEo3DZ6ZnOUo045v3DENLRnzl8yZ8wLLsoiskEfgcWbLSWy90AF+ QWw14pyPyfFmH2ViIXjH =Vno9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
