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

[Thomas Backlund]

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