Hello Simon, On 10/03/2025 10:57, Simon Josefsson wrote:
Philip Hands <p...@hands.com> writes:Simon Josefsson <si...@josefsson.org> writes:While this may be fine to you it is not fine to me, and it is fine to disagree on that.If there were a method of building images that did not touch the non-free components, I presume that would satisfy you.That sounds good!
... Thanks Phil for adding this suggestion to the discussion.I'm one of the active developers of the tool 'live-build', which is used to generate the live images.
I can help you that get started.There is a single script in the repository that is used to build all 9 ISO images for amd64 [1]
If you remove the access to 'non-free-firmware' (lines 237-244), you will generate ISO files where the non-free firmware has not been included at all. I guess that this will fulfil your requirement of having a live image that hasn't seen any non-free firmware.
As noted elsewhere in this long thread on debian-devel (I was offline during the weekend IRL), the generation of the live images themselves is not a lot of effort. The generation is be fully automated and additional images require just a few minutes to set it up. However, it is the quality assurance and the user support part that is most of the work. We have nearly reached the level of quality assurance, that it would be possible to reverse the order the images are handled. At this moment the images are 1) generated, 2) published, 3) tested. In some (nearish) future, the order would be 1) generated, 2) tested, 3) published. Even though openQA [2] helps in automating some tests, there is a lot of test coverage missing (and computing power as well). Before the coverage has been extended, I would really be hesitant to generate another set of images for download, as they would have no guarantee of correct functionality. But then, as noted in the blog post by Thomas Lange from 2025-02-19 [3], Debian currently releases an enormous amount of ISO images for download, and that is rather confusing for many users.
To improve the user experience, work is also under way [4].As noted in the thread before, the largest bottleneck in providing the non-free-firmware-less images is manpower.
Volunteers are welcome, but please use the 'debian-live' mailing list for that.
With kind regards, Roland Clobus[1] https://salsa.debian.org/live-team/live-build/-/blob/master/test/rebuild.sh?ref_type=heads
[2] https://openqa.debian.net [3] https://blog.fai-project.org/posts/cdimages-maze/ [4] https://dev.to/0xfaker/re-styling-debians-download-page-3lmm
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