Is Yunohost keeping pace with non-free Debian?

Debian 12 is not what Debian used to be.

Is Yunohost including Debian’s non-free software?

In the “expert” install, there is a question on non-free firmware first, set to “yes” by default but I have set it to “no” (after, there are two questions on non-free and on contrib, set to “no” by default). In spite of that, non-free firmware was installed, even though the non-free firmware is not in /etc/apt/sources.list.

https://trisquel.info/en/forum/installing-debian-without-non-free-firmware

What do you mean, what it used to be ? Are we gonna have a boring discussion about purism vs pragmatism ?

YunoHost effectively installs “on top of” Debian so it depends wether or not non-free software are enabled in Debian in the first place

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I mean in spite of Debian keeps having its “Philosophy” and its “Debian Social Contract” things change. Moreover, when you install Debian 12 now, and try to opt out the installation of non-free firmware, it ends up being installed.

Just answering the question, not trying to lead to any boring discussion, I don’t have the technical knowledge.

Beyond ethics, I don’t know what the risks of installing non-free firmware are. And I don’t know how much problematic would be for Yunohost to keep that kind of software out.

The risk ranges from “nothing” to “allowing $megacorp to be root on your machine”, since non-free firmware is - I assume - most of the time closed source binaries therefore you have no clue what it does, and then everything depends on speculation, tin foil hat size and threat models. Personally I trust the Debian folks for choosing “the best tradeoff” and it’s probably better to have people running not-totally-free Debian rather than being forced to use Windows somehow because there’s no proper firmware to run Debian.

Regarding the thread on Trisquel forum : I suppose the fact that people end up with non-free (firmware?) packages despite disabling “non-free” during install is indeed misleading / not cool / bad UX, maybe the Debian folks could improve this, but this is out of scope of the YunoHost project

YunoHost, one way or another, is somethings that gets installed on top of Debian, so we have no control over what gets installed “before” YunoHost gets installed. (Though you could argue sometimes we do have some sort of control, depending on the exact hardware type and install procedure …). But anyway it’s not like we would uninstall non-free firmware installed on the system. Supposedly non-free firmware that are installed are supposed to be there for a good reason, such as “the system would not boot in the first place if it wasnt there”

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Thank you.

I guess if you don’t have a device that requires that firmware, that firmware won’t run. Not sure if that’s correct.

Anyway, I hope those Debian folks can improve that issue and we are able to somehow install Debian without that non-free software so that we can afterwards install Yunohost from the script.