[Mageia-dev] RFC: dropping prebuilt broadcom-wl drivers

Wed Dec 26 23:54:20 CET 2012

+Hi,
+
+I'm thinking of dropping the nonfree prebuilt broadcom-wl drivers
+(and thereby their "support" from live images)
+
+This means also dropping them from ldetect-lst, and if we keep/add
+some there, it must be for specific reason and on sub-vendor/device
+level to not force the wl stuff on everyone...
+
+The rationale is:
+1. we promote open source, not closed...
+
+2. latest broadcom-wl driver is not maintained upstream,
+    it's over 1 year old and needs more patches every time
+    the kernel interfcace changes (last working kernel 3.1,
+    then we have started patching it)
+
+3. the broadcom drivers in upstream kernel.org kernels are
+    improving and also adding support for hw that broadcom-wl
+    is not really supporting even if pretends to do so...
+
+4. we are getting more bugreports about broadcom-wl making
+    more problems than it fixes...
+
+5. for broadcom-wl to really work, it needs to blacklist
+    the in-kernel drivers that we ship, something we do in
+    the dkms-broadcom-wl package but for obvious reasons
+    cant do with the prebuilt modules on the live medias
+
+6. dkms-broadcom-wl will still be available on mirrors and
+    on traditional install dvds in nonfree section
+    (new feature for mga3)
+
+
+
+Then we maybe need to add some way for dkms-broadcom-wl
+users to instruct the drakx tools that they prefer/need the
+nonfree driver...
+
+And we stick all this info in mga3 errata.
+
+To do this I suggest we should do this asap, and keep it for
+atleast mga3-beta2 isos, so we can check how it works out...
+
+Comments ?
+
+--
+Thomas
+