Hello,
I'm maybe a bit late for the discussion and maybe things have
already been said but here my 2¢
Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote:
Was the (very real) usecase "my mother has GNOME installed on her computer and buys a new USB printer" considered? ATM, I think, that will "just works". If the drivers are not installed by default somebody will have to install them.But the Debian packaging (task-print-server, cups, …) still installs _a lot_ of printer drivers and other related packages. Although in the past I was convinced we needed to make sure that _all_ printer drivers should be installed everywhere (hence the creation and usage of the printer-driver-all meta-package), I'm getting more and more convinced that we should reverse this course and install "just" what's needed to print driverless to a network printer in "most" cases.
PackageKit[0] can install the drivers on demand (at least GNOME will ask if there is an available driver), but AFAIK there are metadata/glue missing in debian for that to work, was that investigated?
I'm all for reducing the size of the default installation, but I'm afraid in the fact that the end-user experience might suffer.
Kind regards,
Laurent Bigonville
[0] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=882402