On May 22, 2008, David Woodhouse <dwmw2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Wed, 2008-05-21 at 20:53 -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote: >> Assuming that's acceptable upstream. I sort of doubt it, > Post them to me; I'll convert them to 'diff -u' for you and send them > on. Thanks, I'll probably take up the offer. > That is best addressed by making sure you don't come across as a kook. Can't really help that, there's a fundamental cultural clash. That's why your offer to be the man in the middle is so invaluable. > You need to make it clear that you're not just intending to remove stuff > and run away leaving it broken; But I am :-) :-) Seriously, not really; I don't intend to deprive users of the ability to get their stuff to work, but I also have limited resources to put into personal projects, so it's hard to do more than the absolutely minimum necessary to achieve the goal I had in mind. Even more so because I foresee a lot of resistance, that ultimately makes me expect it to be a pointless exercise. But it's yet another of those win-win situations, in which if I try it and succeed, excellent; if I don't, I can at least come back and say "see?, I told you" :-) >> Could you honestly tell me, with a straight face and a reasonable >> degree of assurance, that a patch that performs these actions stands >> any chance whatsoever of being accepted upstream? > I'll tell you what I'd do to _improve_ its chances. Would that do? It seems like a reasonable idea and a useful feature (although I don't quite see that as a major improvement over loading this stuff out of initrd), but I honestly don't see that upstream will want to sacrifice the convenience of having the firmware right there as part of their buildable tarball just because such a feature is in place. They don't exactly care about helping us achieve a 100% Free source tarball, you know :-) I guess we'll have to try and see. Maybe we should start with the non-redistributable piece of firmware I mentioned. > And after that, you can look at evicting the offending blobs from the > kernel altogether. This is the part I don't see happening. And if it doesn't happen, then all of this will have been just running around in circles as far as my goals are concerned. > Since Fedora uses an initrd anyway, we'd probably choose not to > build any of the blobs into the kernel, but to ship them in a > separate package(s). You can then just omit that package from your > compose. As long as they're part of the kernel source tarball, the distribution of any spins allegedly Free still involve the distribution of this non-Free Software. So achieving anything less than a blob-free kernel source tarball is no progress. Now, do you understand what I'd need to achieve in order to accomplish the goal I set out to accomplish, and do you still believe there's even a slight chance of that coming about upstream? -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} FSFLA Board Member ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
