Bug#997795: closed by Brian Potkin <claremont102@gmail.com> (Re: Bug#997795: hplip: Make a hplip-plugin-installer package)
On Mon 25 Oct 2021 at 16:07:36 -0400, Brendon Higgins wrote:
> Hi Brian,
>
> Perhaps I was unclear in my description. You responded:
> > You want to replace hp-plugin
>
> On the contrary, I would think the proposed hplip-plugin-installer package
> would pre-depend on hplip and essentially just run hp-plugin in its postinst.
> It's complementary, not a replacement.
>
> > with something Debian-specific that Debian has to maintain for ever.
>
> Debian-specific, perhaps, though hardly beyond ordinary packaging practices.
> Could be useful for derivatives, too. I would think maintenance for such a
> simple thing would be minimal (barring major upstream changes - which users
> would have to figure out for themselves, otherwise).
>
> And as I mentioned, there's plenty of precedent for this approach, and the
> arguments against those are the same.
It strikes me that an hplip-plugin-installer package would not provide
anything over and above what hp-plugin provides. This checksum issue
reported in Launchpad #1948555 is not uncommon and such a package
would not alleviate it. The usual way to tackle it is download the
plugin and install with 'sh <PLUGIN_FILE>'.
There is also the matter of what runs the proposed package. It cannot
be from any of the HPLIP packages because, as the Debian Policy Manual
says:
In addition, the packages in main must not require or recommend
a package outside of main for compilation or execution...
Ultimately, it is the user's responsibility to download a non-free plugin.
Cheers,
Brian.
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