Bug#1031696: Also affects bookworm

Hi Pete,

On Thu, Mar 09, 2023 at 08:24:08PM +0000, Pete Batard wrote:
>Please note that, since bookworm has started to include firmware files, this
>issue is also starting to affect bookworm users [1] and I can only advise
>Debian maintainers to raise its priority, rather than dismiss it as something
>that will only affect folks who don't use DD mode to write the ISOHybrid, as
>this is going to affect people who are used to simply extracting the ISO
>content onto FAT32 media to install Debian on a UEFI system.
>
>In short, if this issue is left unaddressed, bookworm will be introducing a
>*regression* compared to bullseye, in that it will no longer be possible to
>perform a Debian installation on a UEFI system through file system
>transposition, and everyone will be forced to either use DD or use a utility
>(like Rufus 3.22) that includes a *custom workaround* for Debian, in order to
>duplicate the symbolically linked firmware files.

It looks like James (with some help from Thomas) has worked out a
quick way to change things to make things better for you, which is
good! (Thanks, guys! I'm about to test the change locally.)

*However* you're the *only* person I've seen complaining about this
problem with "file system transposition". I genuinely have not seen
issues raised by people doing this, except where (it seems) Rufus is
working this way. Let's be clear: "transposition" == "copying things
onto a less capable filesystem". I'm normally really impressed by your
skills and knowledge, but I don't understand why you seem to be so
obsessed by this.

With some tweaks like this MR, simply copying files onto FAT32 can
clearly be made to work for UEFI-only media. That's fine. But it still
breaks other useful features, at least:

 * BIOS boot
 * image checksums

and those are important for me and a lot our users. Seriously, just
using DD or similar gives people a verifiable, known-good copy of our
installer image that will boot on as many machines as possible and
work well in the debian-installer environment. That's my primary goal
here.