On May 22, 2008, David Woodhouse <dwmw2(a)infradead.org> 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(a){lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member ¡Sé Libre! =>
http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva(a){redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}