On 10/16/2011 05:54 PM, Roger Leigh wrote:
These should be fixed fairly simply: let's just define a consistent set of naming conventions and migrate the relevant packages. It would be nice to have a means of mapping a given printer model to required package(s) to support and configure printing, perhaps using the OpenPrinting/Foomatic database?
What red Hat does here is that every printer driver package package provides a virtual package for each printer it supports where the name of each virtual package is composed of the MFG and MDL fields of the printer ID. So if a printer gets detected, something like
apt-get install driver-<make>-<model>would install a driver for the printer. The driver package could depend on additional needed packages. The exact name string for the virtual packages should follow the same scheme as for Red Hats RPM packages so that it is easier to create distribution-indpendent packages which are created as RPM and alienized to DEB.
With this in place we do not need to have all our printer drivers on the CD and it is still easy to install our driver packages. Even LSB packages of manufacturers could be marked that way to have alternative possibilities to find and select them. But we should continue to also offer the AppStore-like approach with a centralized database as OpenPrinting is doing it.
Till