[Bug 1915878] Re: RM sl-modem hardware not available

[Steve Langasek]

I think the rationale here is insufficient to justify a removal.

> However, it appears that to the best of my knowledge all hardware
> vendors of SmartLink chips, modems, or whitelabel ODMs are all
> out of business at least as far back as 2005.

Lack of currently-produced hardware is not an argument for ceasing to
support existing hardware which may still be in use.  (This would not,
for example, be a rationale for disabling any of the many drivers in the
linux package for hardware that is no longer produced.)

> sl-modem also does not pass the cat-video test - it is unlikely that even
> if one has sl-modem working one can open Ubuntu and watch a cat
> video online.

I don't know what evidence you have to support this conclusion.

> sl-modem-daemon only builds on i386, and has no amd64 userspace
support.

Yes, but the i386 package is still installable on amd64, so this doesn't
seem to matter for users.

> the kernel driver is not upstream and thus requires constant patching
> by our kernel team to keep building.

"constant patching": there has been exactly one round of patching by the
kernel team to fix a build failure, in 2019.

Note that this package was removed once before, but came back via Debian
(bug #1650379).

If there were pointers to concrete evidence that this is a maintenance
burden for the kernel team, I would accept that as a removal rationale.

** Changed in: sl-modem (Ubuntu)
       Status: Triaged => Won't Fix

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Title:
  RM sl-modem hardware not available

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