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  • Re: Firmwares (was Re: Bits from the DPL)

    From Andrey Rakhmatullin@21:1/5 to Vincent Bernat on Sat Apr 6 09:51:30 2024
    On Mon, Apr 01, 2024 at 06:27:29PM +0200, Vincent Bernat wrote:
    On 2024-04-01 18:05, Jonathan Carter wrote:
    The included firmware contributed to Debian 12 being a huge success,
    but it wasn't the only factor.

    Unfortunately, the shipped firmwares are now almost a year old, including
    for unstable. I am following the progress since quite a few years and I have seen many possible contributors trying to help and fail. The current situation is that Debian does not work well with recent AMD-based laptops
    due to firmware being too old. Therefore, we are back at users trying to update the firmware by copying them from random places (as for myself, I am using the deb generated by upstream's Makefile).

    My personal impression is that we are repeating a common scheme in Debian: maintainers don't have time to move forward due to the task being
    non-trivial for reasons of our own, people are proposing to help (6 people
    in [1]), but this is ignored by the maintainers as they don't have time.

    [1]: https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/firmware-nonfree/-/merge_requests
    Why is updating the firmware packages not trivial? Is it because of
    licensing issues? I always thought it's just copying a bunch of files from
    the linux-firmware repo (but I also often wondered why is the package
    often not up to date).

    --
    WBR, wRAR

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  • From Didier 'OdyX' Raboud@21:1/5 to All on Tue Apr 2 22:42:18 2024
    Le lundi, 1 avril 2024, 19.41:45 h CEST Andrey Rakhmatullin a écrit :
    Why is updating the firmware packages not trivial? Is it because of
    licensing issues? I always thought it's just copying a bunch of files from the linux-firmware repo (but I also often wondered why is the package
    often not up to date).

    My recollection, after getting some MRs merged in the firmware-nonfree package last cycle (oh, a year gone already), is that it's a mix of:

    * the maintainers in position to review, then merge the proposed changes are few, and have plenty on their hands;

    * firmware packages seem to have lower priority during the development cycle, in favour of larger updated shortly-before (or during) the freeze;

    * upstream and Debian (maintainers) are not in complete agreement on what can, or should be shipped in packages; from README.source:
    Also, some of its contents are not clearly redistributable, and some are obsolete for Debian's purposes.

    So almost every file addition needs a careful `git log` review to check for origin, updates, reasoning, version strings, etc. Unless there's tooling I have not found; it's tedious, error-prone (and not very interesting) work (although quite arguably necessary).

    * packaging is very smart, but peculiar (or at least, quite different to what I had been used to before I touched it). Despite good documentation, it's quite a steep intro for newcomers.

    All-in-all, I think it's an all-too-classical case of "we don't have enough humanpower for the job we set out to do". Add a team of motivated individuals to gain the confidence of the existing "already-plenty-on-their-plates maintainers", to then maintain the package on their own. Oh, wait…

    --
    OdyX
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