On Sat, Mar 08, 2025 at 11:16:40PM +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote: > Aurélien COUDERC <li...@coucouf.fr> writes: > > > Le 8 mars 2025 21:09:00 GMT+01:00, Simon Josefsson <si...@josefsson.org> a > > écrit : > > > >>I read this outcome as fairly clear message that, no, Debian does not > >>want to provide a second set of installer images, and is not interested > >>in contributions to make them. > >
Hi Simon, The voting round this issue had nuance, as you can see. In many ways, this reflected the relative difficulty of continuing to do things as we had been doing. Nobody was keen to continue duplicating effort for the sake of duplicate effort and the wording reflected this. There had been a *lot* of discussion over approximately two years, a couple of Debconfs about the fact that some things could not be achieved without non-free firmware potentially even at early stage in the installer. > > > > What the GR says is that you cannot dump that work on the shoulders of > > the people currently maintaining the installer, coordinating the > > releases… > > Absolutely. > I would be happy if my perception of the situation is wrong, and that > fully free official debian installer images was a welcome contribution. > Is that really the case? > We had a "fully free" installer and a large non-free archive from which many people pulled firmware to make their hardware work fully. Non-free-firmware being pulled out of the rest of non-free was a recognition of that fact and a distancing of firmware from the rest of non-free. > > Andy Cater's post is hard to parse for me. Andy, did you intend it as a > sarcastic comment about something that has been beating to death too > many times already and has no chance of becoming reality? Or was it a > real invitation for discussion and accept contributions? My earlier > interactions about this issue were stuck on a deal-breaker: > It is slighttly sarcastic, yes, but it also outlines exactly what is involved if you want to pursue a fully free installer (again). Having been involved in explaining the difference between the installer and the unofficial installer containing firmware far too many times, it was difficult to justify an idealogical separation that made it hard for people to install Debian (or impossible if you were visually impaired, potentially). Maintaining two sets of images would be hard. Testing two sets of images at point release time was also hard. > Andy Cater: > > Please feel free to pick up the code and generate the second set of > > installer images, maintaining the code to exclude non-free-firmware. > > If I understand what you imply here correctly, this is still a problem. > Proper fully free images cannot be generated by going through an > intermediate step that involve non-free software. > You can build an image that contains no firmware. You can build an image that contains only free firmware. You can build an image that contains non-free firmware. Each of these can be built from the code in the Debian archive. The scripts to produce each of these are slightly different: you would need to satisfy yourself that every time you regenerate images you have not inadvertently included inappropriate firmware somewhere along the line. I'd suggest a long read through the mailing list archives and watching a couple of the videos from Sledge. It is harder than it looks and relies on a *lot* of effort to do this. With every good wish, as ever, Andy Cater (amaca...@debian.org) > /Simon
