hplip: hp-toolbox advertising?

[Thomas M Steenholdt]

Gianluca Sforna wrote:
> On 3/27/07, Thomas M Steenholdt <tmus at tmus.dk> wrote:
>> (disclaimer: i'm not actually using the hp software...)
>>
>> But, the whole analogy to looking a gift horse in the mouth is somewhat
>> mute here, wouldn't you say? Just because corp XYZ throws a pile of
>> software at the open source community, doesn't mean we have to embrace
>> it if we don't like it. This is not a gift from anyones grandma, but
>> from a manufacturer that just wants an easy to use toolset for linux
>> users. The cause is noble enough, but if the software is less than
>> ideal, which it appears to be in this case, we are free to choose to do
>> whatever we want with it.
> 
> In general I agree with you, but the problem is we lack an alternative
> package offering the same (or similar) features. In this case,
> removing hplip results in someone not being able to work OOTB with its
> multifulction printer, which is not the best thing we could do.
> 
> I think the best thing is to ship it as is (eventually adding a Fedora
> specific icon to fix the problem raised by the original poster) and be
> sure to pester upstream for a more SANE approach...
> 
> /me goes disabling hplip from each machine in the office
> 

Again, I have to state that I don't know this software, so my discussion 
is from a more generic view.

Even if we have no alternative, I'm not sure it's the best thing we can 
do, to install software with design/implementation security flaws. If 
that is the case, I'd much rather have people pull this from a third 
party repository, that installing it by default.

The ideal way, seems to be to convince HP and all other device vendors 
to contribute to some of the standard frameworks, to improve on those, 
instead of introducing a complete new toolset for every vendor/device 
combo (windows style).

/Thomas