Bug#904070: fixed
I manually copied /etc/hp/hplip.conf from another machine and the
hplip-gui stuff all works now.
After having looked around I have no idea why 1) this file is even in
libsane-hpaio rather than hplip or hplip-gui, 2) it is not insalled
when I purge hplip* and autoremove (thus removing libsane-hpaio), rm
-rf /etc/hp/ then reinstall hplip-gui (thus reinsalling
libsane-hpaio). There is nothing I can see that would stop this file
from being unpacked to /etc/hp in this case.
If purge/removal of cups/hplip stuff had just killed all the
processes, I probably would not have gone crazy with killall, rm -rf,
purging, etc, etc.. just to get rid of a bunch of bad settings and
duplicate printers that somehow wound up in my configuration and I
couldn't figure out how they were surviving purge AND rm -rf. Not to
mention I wouldn't have spent so long on this issue after the fact if
the config file that is REQUIRED for hplip-gui components to run
wasn't in some OTHER package nobody is ever going to think to purge
(its a lib package) when trying to get rid of configs, and if
reinstalling said package didn't result in failure to provide said
config file when its clearly part of the package and there is no
postinst script to prevent it from happening in any way.
furthermore hplip does have a postinst script that runs two perl
one-liners trying to modify this config file /etc/hp/hplip.conf
without being able to assure its even there due to whatever weirdness
is going on here. Consider moving the config file into hplip or
hplip-gui perhaps, unless there is some conceivable way a user would
use libsane-hpaio WITHOUT hplip or hplip-gui and this file is actually
required for such usage... because I KNOW its required for hplip-gui
and it not being in one of the hplip packages causes confusion and
potential for breakage.
I consider this issue resolved, and advise the maintainers to
reconsider placement of this config file and to have pre/postrm
scripts stop hplip utils and such to insure that a apt --purge remove
cups* hplip* will result in a pristine system so that reinstalling
those packages will result in a default cups/hplip configuration
clearing out any bad settings. As of right now you can purge and rm
-rf the whole damn system and still have all your bad settings because
there is no such check to make sure processes keeping these settings
in memory are stopped.. which had me banging my head off a wall for a
week trying to figure out why I had a ton of fax/printers in the
settings when I only have 1 printer, and why cups would not let me
change it, saying unauthorized. There is no reason this should be any
diferent than everyhing else in debian, where a --purge or
--force-confmiss or such will just clear it all out and give you a
working default config.
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