On Wed, 20 Oct 2004, Marco d'Itri wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >Given that the entire purpose of the driver is to actually *drive a > >device*, and that it can't do that at all without the firmware, then the > No, apparently you do not understand how the driver, hardware and > firmware interact. The driver is fully functional as is: the firmware is > needed by the hardware device, not by the driver.
This comes back to the same issue: Is there a dependency relationship between the package that provides the driver and the firmware itself? If the package requires the presence of a firmware file which must be uploaded to the device at runtime in order to be useful at all, then the package has a dependency relationship with the firmware. If the package doesn't need to upload a firmware file to the device in order to be useful at all, then it probably doesn't have a dependency relationship with the firmware. In any event, whether or not a dependency actually exists really isn't a subject for this list to discuss as it has nothing to do with the license, legality, or DFSG status of a package; only policy and the package's Depends:x are at issue here. You can raise it on -devel if it actually occurs, or users can file bugs against such a package if they feel improper dependencies are in place. Don Armstrong -- Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. -- Mark Twain http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
