RM sl-modem hardware not available

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

RM sl-modem hardware not available

sl-modem is a dkms module & userpsace daemon to support SmartLink modems.

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.

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.

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

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

I would like to:

1) remove sl-modem source and binary packages from ubuntu archive

2) remove sl-modem plugin in ubuntu-drivers-common, and thus drop dependency on alsa-utils

[Chris Halse Rogers (raof)]

Do these steps need to be taken in any particular order? Does the removal of the ubuntu-drivers-common plugin need to happen before removing sl-modem so as to prevent breakage?

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

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.