[Mageia-dev] Non-free firmwares in installer

Fri Mar 25 13:04:38 CET 2011

This has really moved away from the question of providing 
+drivers/firmware to a "pissing contest" about whose philosophy the 
+default offerings should represent.
+
+Presumably, FLOSS supporters are satisfied with the state of the current 
+ISOs, and https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=523 would address 
+extending install functionality without changing the content of the 
+existing ISOs, which should be an improvement over where we are now 
+without corrupting the FLOSS purity of the existing ISOs.
+
+I think we should proceed with that approach, and leave the more 
+controversial question of whether the ISOs should be merged for another 
+day.
+
+You can say what you like about newbies or "Aunt Edna", but anyone who 
+can find one ISO for themselves can find two, and the argument about how 
+the drivers/firmware wouldn't take up much space on the DVD goes both 
+ways, since downloading a separate ISO for them is then not that big a 
+deal in terms of bandwidth.
+
+If you can't understand a reasonably verbose panel that says that "your 
+computer's hardware requires our secondary network/drivers/firmware 
+CD/DVD/ISO in order to activate networking", and says that you can find 
+it in the same place you got this disk, be that a network repository or 
+a friend who burned it for you, then you probably need to be reminded to 
+breathe.  Such people are hardly about to be Mageia early-adopters, and 
+we have some time to discuss how we want to deal with them.
+
+Eventually, we may agree to offer a merged ISO.  Better still, since 
+anyone falling into the category of needing that much hand-holding is 
+unlikely to have bought a bare machine and is probably coming from 
+Windows, maybe we ought to provide a Windows app that checks the 
+hardware, downloads the needed ISOs to the Windows filesystem (on what 
+we assume is a working network-enabled system) after suitable prompts to 
+the user, and then enhance the install to look for them there.
+