Juerg, thank you for picking this up and my apologies for the late response.
You are of course right that there is no scientific answer or approach to this question. I'd simply look at the biggest directories with ncdu and make a decision if I thought that hardware was common when going down the list from top towards the bottom (first few entries only, of course). Let's be clear that this is not about stopping to support anything, upsetting anybody or break things or make things harder for people. Anybody who has the default of installing recommends by default will not be affected by this at all. It is about choice, for people in a scenario with limited ressources who'd like to trim some fat. Those people would need to make a conscious choice to remove the unnecessary (for them) packages. I certainly won't need support for netronome on any of my machines and would not install the package that contains it if it were optional. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Kernel Packages, which is subscribed to linux-firmware in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1958518 Title: split some large, lesser-used firmware files into -extra package Status in linux-firmware package in Ubuntu: New Status in linux-firmware source package in Jammy: New Bug description: The linux-image-generic package depends on linux-firmware which is over half a gigabyte in size installed. I will assume that quite many people do not have netronome hardware which weighs in at almost 150MB of that. I kindly suggest to put such large firmware for less common hardware into its own linux-firmware-extra package which would be recommended by linux-firmare. Comments? I'm willing to help with the packaging provided that the changes have a chance to land. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-firmware/+bug/1958518/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kernel-packages Post to : kernel-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kernel-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
