hplip: hp-toolbox advertising?

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2007-03-27 at 10:21 -0600, Bernard Johnson wrote:
> Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > I can see the point of putting things in the menus which are explicitly
> > installed by the user. But to force everything that is in the default
> > install into the menus just because somebody thought it would be a good
> > idea to write in the packaging guideline that "every gui app has to have
> > a desktop file" will quickly lead to unusable menus. 
> 
> But let's look at why it's in the default install:
> 
> http://hplip.sourceforge.net/
> "The HPLIP project provides printing support for 1,139 printer models,
> including Deskjet, Officejet, Photosmart, PSC (Print Scan Copy),
> Business Inkjet, LaserJet, and LaserJet MFP."
> 
> 1139 is not an insignificant number.  Oh, and the fact that we don't
> have the ability to decide intelligently if it needs to be installed.

How many of these are not supported by cups/foomatic ?

> > I wonder what people will think about this when more vendors see the
> > light of open source and  we end up with 10 different "print" menu
> > items, and 10 different system daemons handling some vendors devices
> > (written in python and pulling in Qt, no less). 
> 
> Then this is a failure of the packaging or packaging process.  It has
> nothing to do with the individual package.

I don't follow you here. I'm making the argument that this individual
package installs a resource hungry system daemon that always runs even
if it has nothing to do, and the ui duplicates a good chunk of the
printing support in the rest of the desktop. And you say that has
nothing to do with the individual package ?