Take hplip-gui into the standard installation/live session of Ubuntu/Edubuntu

[Till Kamppeter]

Now, where Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Edubuntu (Oneiric) has Qt on the desktop CD, we can get the full functionality of HP's printer driver suite HPLIP into the GNOME-based flavors of Ubuntu. We only need to seed hplip-gui and users get the HP Toolbox (hp-toolbox), the GUI for sending faxes (hp-sendfax), the GUI for the automatic download of firmware files (hp-plugin), ...

So we should add hplip-gui to the desktop seeds.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Wouldn't hplip-gui need to be moved to main first?

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Adding edubuntu and xubuntu meta tasks for those teams to review.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

hplip-gui comes from the source package hplip which is already in main, so moving hplip-gui to main should be possible without formal MIR.

[Lionel Le Folgoc (mrpouit)]

FYI, Xubuntu doesn't have Qt on the desktop cd.

[Dmitry Shachnev (mitya57)]

Blocked by bug 805303 (Qt apps don't work and crash WM with default theme settings).

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

With bug 805303 being fixed now, can we have hplip-gui seeded?

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

I have checked and bug 805303 is really fixed. The HPLIP tools now work with the default configuration, so hplip-gui can get seeded.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

It's very late in the game for oneiric, and hplip-gui didn't get any serious testing yet. Based on our experience of what crazy hacks hplip used to do in the past, I think this should get a deeper review first before releasing it to the general public. So this is for the P cycle.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

OK, let us seed it in the week when the archive for P opens, to get full 6 months of intense testing, to let the testers be greeted with HPLIP's crash reports directly in the beginning of the cycle. Then I will do some calls for testing on the mailing list and on the UDS and on the Sprint. As I can buy HP printers worth 10000 USD every year on HP's costs, so I can buy some printers for UDSes and Sprints (which will travel from event to event like all this network and music equipment). I can also buy HP printers for certain key developers of Ubuntu, especially in the desktop area.

In addition, HP is taking care of making HPLIP compatible with all important distros. So I can carry on all testing results and bug reports to HP and help them to improve their distro integration.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Should I open a Blueprint/UDS session on it?

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Till Kamppeter [2011-09-27 9:07 -0000]:
> Should I open a Blueprint/UDS session on it?

I don't think it's necessary. We should just enable it early in P and
see how it's going. Do you see anything which we need to discuss there
in advance in a large group?

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

pitti, not needed, thought about that perhaps a session about migrating system tray apps to indicator applets is needed, but seems that with sni-qt now we can avoid big Ubuntu-specific patches for many packages (and also keep them in sync with the Debian packages).

[Iain Lane (laney)]

Why do people without HP kit need to have these packages installed? Can't we be smarter and only install them on demand?

[Dmitry Shachnev (mitya57)]

Removing FFe tag because this won't be fixed in Oneiric.
@Till: Note that you should firstly write a MIR for this package (see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MainInclusionProcess for details).

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

A MIR is not needed as the source package, hplip, is already in Main. So it is enough to seed it. This we will do in the beginning of the P cycle.

[Stéphane Graber (stgraber)]

Marked Edubuntu as invalid because we inherit from the ubuntu meta package and I'd rather have Ubuntu make the change first.
Once Ubuntu does it, Edubuntu will have it too, so no change needed on our side.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Now, as the archive is open for Precise, can hplip-gui be added to the Ubuntu seed? The systray icon and all GUI apps are now correctly working and when we add hplip-gui early in the cycle we have enough time for testing and arranging on the CDs and upstream has 2 or 3 releases to fix bugs.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Still way too heavy:

The following NEW packages will be installed:
  hplip-gui libart-2.0-2 libqt4-designer libqt4-help libqt4-scripttools
  libqt4-test libqtassistantclient4 libqtwebkit4 python-qt4 python-qt4-dbus
  python-renderpm python-reportlab python-reportlab-accel python-sip
0 upgraded, 14 newly installed, 0 to remove and 60 not upgraded.
Need to get 16.8 MB of archives.
After this operation, 68.3 MB of additional disk space will be used.

16.8 MB compressed CD space for a second printer admin tool seems quite excessive. Can we strip down the dependencies?

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

With the switchover from Banshee to Rhythmbox as default music player we will save 30 MB on the CD (mainly due to the Mono stack not needed any more) so then we would have the space to include hplip-gui.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

First, the RB->Banshee move hasn't been confirmed yet. But it would be quite wrong to argue for doing that move because Banshee/Mono take too much space, and then at the same time include another piece of bloat which is used by only a few users.

Can we offer to install hplip-gui in s-c-p or control-center iff the user actually has an HP printer?

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

pitti, let us do so, let us somehow make the connection/setup of an HP printer trigger the offering of the download of hplip-gui. As we will probably not be able to get this into s-c-p upstream, we could do this perhaps separately, as we do with the firmware file installation for the cheaper HP laser printers.

[Bryan Quigley (bryanquigley)]

Does anyone still want this to happen for 15.10+?

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

I would like to have hplip-gui in the standard installation and live session, as this makes it much easier for users of HP printers (especially models with special demands like firmware upload or WiFi configuration via USB) to get their printers working. As we now do not restrict ourselves to the size of a CD we should be able to do this now.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

This still needs work, though:

 - It pulls gksu back in, which we don't want by default. Programs should use PolicyKit (pkexec if they must, but preferrably a privileged D-Bus backend which checks polkit privileges)

 - It pulls PyQt4 in, which is deprecated -- this should be ported to Qt5.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Reported both problems upstream, Qt5 transition as bug 1471229 and use of PolicyKit as bug 1471232.

[David Giard (swe3tdave-deactivatedaccount)]

My Laserjet p1102w printer is detected and install correctly, but does not work (16.04 Ubuntu mate) without installing hplip-gui and running hp-plugin. Also there is no warning anywhere telling me i have to run hp-plugin to make the printer work.