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.