separate nic-*modules-udeb, remnants of the past?

[Timo Aaltonen]

	Hi!

  A friend of mine was pretty upset when he (and some friends of his)
were unable to install Ubuntu with networking when using the netboot-
and server-images. The reason for that was that jme.ko is not included
in nic-modules-udeb (*). The module lists are maintained by hand,
because they are split in nic-{,pcmcia,usb,shared}-modules-udeb.

Colin mentioned that this was due to some images not needing all the
modules, so to save space they are split this way. I checked the
extracted sizes of those (i386, generic):

nic-modules:		6096 kB
nic-shared-modules:	719 kB
nic-pcmcia-modules:	424 kB
nic-usb-modules:	776 kB

So, is it really worth all the trouble to save ~1.2MB (+the missing
modules) on the installation media? Wouldn't it make more sense to
automatically include all the drivers (and blacklist some, if necessary)
so networking works regardless of the installation medium used. Working
NICs are a rather critical piece of the puzzle these days :)


* https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/560249

-- 
timo.aaltonen at canonical.com