[Pkg-hpijs-devel] Bug#512250: hpijs uninstalls other printing systems

[Rogério Brito]

On May 26 2009, Rogério Brito wrote:
> P.S.: And the ironic thing is that the debconf prompt of foomatic asks
> if the user wants to use lprng as a print spooler, which is something
> that will be removed. This inconsistency is not something that one would
> expect.

And if this weren't enough, using utilities like "hp-info" (contained in
hplip, which removed lprng) don't work without a package (hplip-gui)
which brings in decoders for movies, a sound system (phonon), among many
unneeded graphical user interface libraries:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
rbrito at chagas:~$ hp-info 

HP Linux Imaging and Printing System (ver. 3.9.4b)
Device Information Utility ver. 5.2

Copyright (c) 2001-9 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it
under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.

warning: Qt/PyQt 4 initialization failed.
error: hp-info -u/--gui requires Qt4 GUI support. Entering interactive mode.

HP Linux Imaging and Printing System (ver. 3.9.4b)
System Tray Status Service ver. 2.0

Copyright (c) 2001-9 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it
under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.

warning: Qt/PyQt 4 initialization failed.
error: hp-systray requires Qt4 GUI and DBus support. Exiting.
(...)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

And hplip-gui is not even a recommends of hplip, but a suggests. These
dependencies are contradictory: if a user wants to install fewer
programs, the packaging system doesn't allow him; if he wants to install
more software (breaking his own installation of a working system), then
he is left with a half broken system, due to unmet dependencies.

This can't be right.


Sincerely yours, Rogério Brito.

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{mackenzie,ime.usp}.br : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito : http://meusite.mackenzie.com.br/rbrito
Projects: algorithms.berlios.de : lame.sf.net : vrms.alioth.debian.org