David Zeuthen <david <at> fubar.dk> writes:
- Provide their own UI for using the device; just provide the
drivers,
thank you very much; we don't really need foreign tools to make this
harder on the users. Bad.
And we (users of HP printers) are supposed to check the ink levels, clean the
cartridges etc. how then? Where's the non-"foreign" (i.e. non-vendor) tools
to
handle this? Oh wait, there aren't any...
- All the HP stuff, since there is a lot of it, pulls in Qt
So what? How is it better if it pulls in GTK+ instead? Not all the world uses
GNOME... Now they couldn't provide a GUI tool at all, but then see the above
paragraph for why that would be a bad idea.
Instead, for example, HP should get their scanner drivers into the
SANE
project. My personal opinion is that with HPLip, HP is paying lip
service to the Linux community by treating us as if we were Windows
where this sort of "let's throw lots of vendor-specific tools and UI
crap at the user" is common.
My personal opinion is that thanks to hplip, HP printers are the ones which
support Free Software the best.
HP: please try to be a good open source citizen.
Sure, about the daemon, the user-space vfat driver etc., the implementation of
hplip could be less of a mess, but it's all vendor-provided GPL code! There
aren't many vendors doing that. So calling HP "not a good open source
citizen"
just because their GPL code doesn't fit your standards of quality is really
unfair IMHO.
As for the actual issue in this thread, I have a suggestion: what about making
hp-toolbox a separate subpackage of hplip, which is not installed by default,
but which (when installed) comes with a menu item? That would solve both
the "vendor-specific menu item forced on everyone" and the "hplip requires
PyQt" issues.
Kevin Kofler