hplip: hp-toolbox advertising?

[Bernard Johnson]

Matthias Clasen wrote:
> 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 really get the feeling you would rather punish users because it
doesn't work the way you want it to.

The fact is that it supports a lot of printers.

>>> 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 ?

Whether or not the software sucks is another issue.  If we are
installing software for hardware that people do not have, and then
multiple instances of programs that have identical functionality, that
is a packaging problem.  Even if hplip was the best software in the
world it would not fix that.

Should we talk about the fact that Fedora already has three copies of
VNC-type programs without an integrated codebase?