On Sat, 24 Jul 2021 at 09:05:59 +0200, Cyril Brulebois wrote: > If we were to go the “(almost) all in” route, it might make sense to > either blacklist (some of) those, or to whitelist the known-ok ones, > which would require some monitoring of new additions over time (which > dillon, behind d-i.debian.org, could help us with).
As an 80% solution, would it be feasible to have the officially-unofficial media with firmware install the firmware-linux metapackage by default, or at least install it if a desktop task was chosen? firmware-linux pulls in firmware-amd-graphics and firmware-misc-nonfree (which has the Nvidia firmware), and I think its rules for inclusion imply not needing an EULA or other special license-acceptance by the user. If I understand correctly, the equivalent packages are installed by default in many distros that are less purist about being 100% Free Software than we are. I think the hierarchy of importance for installing things *from d-i* goes something like this: - essential boot stuff like raspi-firmware, without which the installed system is completely unusable on that hardware (but I don't think it's possible to start d-i on Raspberry Pi without providing the equivalent of raspi-firmware out-of-band somehow anyway) - graphics devices: nobody wants a blank screen, and new users will be much more able to install extra packages later if they can at least get into a working GUI - network devices: networking makes it much easier to install more firmware, but if you have a working GUI and no networking, you can at least read documentation, install more firmware from non-netinst media, or get a list of packages to download onto a USB stick on another machine - audio and accessibility devices: essential for users who need those particular accessibility measures (screen readers, in the case of audio), but can be set up later from the installed system for most users - everything else (in particular firmware-ivtv and firmware-microbit-python are not essential to anyone's use of the system as a whole, only their use of specific devices) smcv