hplip: hp-toolbox advertising?

[Kevin Kofler]

David Zeuthen <david <at> fubar.dk> writes:
>  - Provide their own UI for using the device; just provide the drivers,
>    thank you very much; we don't really need foreign tools to make this
>    harder on the users. Bad.

And we (users of HP printers) are supposed to check the ink levels, clean the 
cartridges etc. how then? Where's the non-"foreign" (i.e. non-vendor) tools to 
handle this? Oh wait, there aren't any...

>  - All the HP stuff, since there is a lot of it, pulls in Qt

So what? How is it better if it pulls in GTK+ instead? Not all the world uses 
GNOME... Now they couldn't provide a GUI tool at all, but then see the above 
paragraph for why that would be a bad idea.

> Instead, for example, HP should get their scanner drivers into the SANE
> project. My personal opinion is that with HPLip, HP is paying lip
> service to the Linux community by treating us  as if we were Windows
> where this sort of "let's throw lots of vendor-specific tools and UI
> crap at the user" is common.

My personal opinion is that thanks to hplip, HP printers are the ones which 
support Free Software the best.

> HP: please try to be a good open source citizen.

Sure, about the daemon, the user-space vfat driver etc., the implementation of 
hplip could be less of a mess, but it's all vendor-provided GPL code! There 
aren't many vendors doing that. So calling HP "not a good open source citizen" 
just because their GPL code doesn't fit your standards of quality is really 
unfair IMHO.

As for the actual issue in this thread, I have a suggestion: what about making 
hp-toolbox a separate subpackage of hplip, which is not installed by default, 
but which (when installed) comes with a menu item? That would solve both 
the "vendor-specific menu item forced on everyone" and the "hplip requires 
PyQt" issues.

        Kevin Kofler