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:
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.
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.
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
