On Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:56:02 BST, David Woodhouse said:

quoted text
> They had to 'make oldconfig' and then actually _choose_ to say 'no' to
> an option which is fairly clearly documented, that they are the
> relatively unusual position of wanting to have said 'yes' to. You're
> getting into Aunt Tillie territory, when you complain about that.

Note that some of us chose 'no' because we *thought* that we already *had*
everything in /lib/firmware that we needed (in my case, the iwl3945 wireless
firmware and the Intel cpu microcode).  The first that I realized that
the tg3 *had* firmware was when I saw the failure message, because before
that, the binary blob was inside the kernel.  And then, it wasn't trivially
obvious how to get firmware loaded if the tg3 driver was builtin rather
than a module.

And based on some of the other people who apparently got bit by this same
exact behavior change on this same exact "builtin but no firmware in kernel"
config with this same exact driver, it's obvious that one of two things is true:

1) Several of the highest-up maintainers are Aunt Tillies.
or
2) This is sufficiently subtle and complicated that far more experienced
people than Aunt Tillie will Get It Very Wrong.