[sclug] On ultra cheap machines

[Alex Butcher]

Hi Phil -

On Fri, 26 Apr 2013, Philip Hands wrote:

> Hi Alex,
>
> I hope life's treating you well.

Yeah, not too bad, thanks. Apart from blindly buying hardware with Intel
GPUs because "they're always well-supported by Linux and Xorg"... :-)

> Alex Butcher <lug at assursys.co.uk> writes:
>> Supposedly, there is/was an Intel-sponsored attempt to get drivers into
>> Debian: <http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/12/msg00330.html>, but
>> the Debian devs bikeshedded him away, it seems...
>
> I don't think it's bikeshedding to point out that they missed the
> freeze:
>
>  http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/12/msg00331.html
>
> Given that the drivers in question are proprietary, they will _never_ be
> in Debian main anyway ... they could however be in the non-free section,
> but I don't see why you'd expect Debian to make exceptions to the
> release process for non-free software.

Ah, I was maybe a bit harsh, but it seemed to me as though the responses he
received, whilst accurate and consistent with Debian policy, weren't as
helpful and, well, /friendly/ to a potential new contributor as one might
have hoped. Maybe I'm wrong and he's quietly working on doing it right for a
later Debian release, but the thread looked a bit depressing to an outsider.

> Your other comments, and Ubuntu's inability to maintain support for this
> driver, makes me think that any effort spent forcing this drivel into
> the release would be wasted at best, and might inflict bugs that are
> impossible to fix on our users for the next couple of years, followed by
> no upgrade path after that.

Well, reading between the lines, it struck me that he was hoping to persuade
Intel to get Imagination Technologies to do a better job (i.e.  something
like the nVidia blobs with glue code) of the release for his effort.  Yes, I
appreciate that facilitating non-Free software isn't Debian's job, but maybe
that was what he thought was the best approach to getting something sensible
for Ubuntu too ("upstream first", and all that).  And, of course, a
reference implementation in Debian could be freely used by other
non-Debian-based distros.

> Cheers, Phil.

Best Regards,
Alex