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Re: Renaming HPLIP printer driver packages

On 10/21/2011 04:38 PM, Didier Raboud wrote:

Le jeudi, 20 octobre 2011 21.50:47, Till Kamppeter a écrit :


First, we need to determine which binary packages of HPLIP are printer
driver packages. Only these get renamed, all the others not.


My point of view thereabout is that a user should know, when seeing a
"printer-driver-*" package that "if I want my ${FOO} printer to work, I should
find one amongst those to make it work". So the printer-driver-* packages
should provide "what makes it work", either directly or trough dependencies.


Printer driver packages are those which provide PPD files, and these are
the packages which use the PPD updating facility of our CUPS package.


Hmm; not really. As far as I understand it, e.g. c2050 is a printer driver
package, and it only provides two binaries: c2050 and ps2lexmark.


So>  we simply look into /usr/share/cups/ppd-updaters/


Again, I'm not sure that's a good-enough measure.
Sorry, forget about all that. There are some few driver packages which do not provide PPDs, where the PPDs are provided by foomatic-db. So a printer driver package is determined by whether it contains a printer driver executable or, if no driver executable is needed, provide PPD files (for example for PostScript printers. Generally we should consider all those packages printer driver packages, if the provide support for additional printers in addition to CUPS, Ghostscript, and Foomatic. 


and by that we identify the following packages as printer driver packages:

- hpijs
- hpijs-ppds
- hplip
- hplip-cups

The simple approach would be to rename all these simply adding
"printer-driver-" to the beginning of each package name. No problem with
hpijs, hpijs-ppds, and hplip-cups.


Hmm. What is the difference between hpijs and hpijs-ppds ? Wouldn't it be
possible to pyppd-compress the PPDs of the latter and merge them back
(again?). This is confusing (to me…).
hpijs contains the HPIJS driver executable plus a .drv file to generate the PPDs. hpijs-ppds contains the PPDs for hpijs ready-made. This is for using hpijs with non-CUPS spoolers. Due to this I have left the PPDs uncompressed. 




hplip I do not like to rename, as it contains mainly the core of the HPLIP
software suite and only ais an additional part it contains PostScript PPD
files. So I would split the hplip binary package into hplip and hplip-
postscript and then rename the hplip-postscript package. The hplip-
postscript will contain the compressed archive of the PostScript PPDs plus
the /usr/lib/cups/filter/hpcac filter, which is used by PostScript color
lasers to control access to color printing.


Sounds sane, but I confess that most of the hpijs<->  hplip picture is still
blurry to me.

Cheers,


The drivers in HPLIP are:

1. PPDs for HP's PostScript printers, currently in package hplip.
2. hpcups CUPS Raster driver, default driver for non-HP printers, currently in package hplip-cups. 3. hpijs, IJS plug-in module for Ghostscript, supports the same printers as hpcups, currently in package hpijs.
hpijs-ppds is not really an additional driver, it simply contains uncompressed, ready-made PPDs for hpijs.
hplip and hplip-data provide the core infrastructure of HPLIP, the former package the architecture-dependent files and the latter the architecture-independent ones. The PostScript PPDs do not need HPLIP so that they work, therefore I suggest to move them into their own binary package. So users who do not use CUPS can install only the PPDs and not HPLIP, as HPLIP only works with CUPS. 

   Till
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