HP PPDs installed by foo2zjs should use *Manufacturer: "HP"/Too many drivers in distro

[Reuben Firmin]

Binary package hint: foomatic-db

Breezy had tons of LaserJet drivers; Dapper does not. I assume that they were trimmed because the driver DB was getting too bulky. My printer is one of those trimmed: HP LaserJet 4L.

I suggest that there be a new package: foomatic-net, which interfaces with the database at Linuxprinting.org. That way, the foomatic database that's bundled with Eft can be ultra minimal, and users can still have the huge range of drivers available. After all, once you've installed the driver, you are rarely going to use the database again, so why have 70MBs sitting around doing nothing?

(If the user does not have a net connection, then they should be able to install the database from the cd.)

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

I don't have a LaserJet 4L but on my up to date Dapper 6.06 LTS all drivers for LaserJet 4L are there (ljet4, gutenprint, hpijs and ljet4dith). Which one are you missing?
Is package ubuntu-desktop installed on you system? This package normally depends on packages foomatic-filters-ppds and hplip-ppds which should be installed.
Marking as "Needs info".

[Reuben Firmin (reubenf)]

Ah, I see what happened. Under the drivers list is "Hewlett Packard", which contains only 4 drivers, and then a little further "HP", which contains the bulk of the drivers. I guess I missed HP the first time round. I suggest you merge them to avoid similar confusion.

[Ante Karamatić (ivoks)]

On Sat, 15 Jul 2006 00:45:26 -0000
Reuben Firmin <email address hidden> wrote:

> Ah, I see what happened. Under the drivers list is "Hewlett Packard",
> which contains only 4 drivers, and then a little further "HP", which
> contains the bulk of the drivers. I guess I missed HP the first time
> round. I suggest you merge them to avoid similar confusion.

There is no Hewlett Packard set of printer drivers in default Dapper
install (and IRC, there were no Hewlett Packard drivers in Breezy too).
You've probably installed manually some drivers.

OK to reject this bug?

--
Ante Karamatic | 0xD3BDA225 | 0x0A4A0161
<email address hidden> | <email address hidden> | ivoks.blogspot.com
"Tomorrow is my day off, so please stay off the powder!"

[Reuben Firmin (reubenf)]

Well, I know that when I browsed whatever manufacturer section on a fresh install, that the 4L driver was not there (that in fact there was a far smaller number of drivers than I'd been expecting.) I should have taken a screenshot, but I'm fairly sure it was the small subset that are now in "Hewlett Packard". But go ahead and close if you can't reproduce.

[Ante Karamatić (ivoks)]

On Sat, 15 Jul 2006 06:03:45 -0000
Reuben Firmin <email address hidden> wrote:

> Well, I know that when I browsed whatever manufacturer section on a
> fresh install, that the 4L driver was not there (that in fact there

HP 4L drivers are in packages foomatic-filters-ppds and hplip-ppds.
Other generic HP LaserJet drivers are also in gutenprint and cupsys
(there is HP LaserJet driver bundled with cups).

ubuntu-desktop depends on all of these packages, so on fresh install of
ubuntu desktop, you have all of this drivers. In the same time, there is
no package that provides "Helwett Packard" drivers.

I'm rejecting this bug.

--
Ante Karamatic | 0xD3BDA225 | 0x0A4A0161
<email address hidden> | <email address hidden> | ivoks.blogspot.com
"Tomorrow is my day off, so please stay off the powder!"

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

@Reuben
"HP" and "Hewlett Packard" were merged around april in Dapper to one manufacturer indicaton "HP", so there is only manufacturer indication "HP" in the released Ubuntu 6.06 LTS.

You probably did some manual changes, make sure you have the following package versions installed:
* foomatic-filters-ppds 20060406-0ubuntu1
* hplip-ppds 0.9.7-4ubuntu1
* gnome-cups-manager 0.31-1.1ubuntu13

It is not a good idea to file 2 seperate bugs in one report, this makes it difficult for people to comment. You could open a seperate bug report for your foomatic-net suggestion.
My opinion on this matter is that gnome-cups-manager should make use of foomatic xml database and generate PPD files from it when needed. This allow greater flexibility: e.g. only PPD files for a specific locale could be generated. As a plus this decreases disk space usage compared to the current prebuilt PPDs. It is not a good idea to fetch every driver from the linuxprinting.org website since some people have no permanent connection to the internet, the linuxprinting.org website can be down. They would be unable to install their printer. Disk space is cheap these days, so less than 70 MB don't really matter. People concerned with disk space can still remove the prebuilt PPD packages and download the PPD from linuxprinting.org for their printer model.
I think it is better to create a specification from this instead of filling a bug report.

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

Reuben,

I just noticed you are right. In CUPS webinterface there is a manufacturer indication "HP" and "Hewlett-Packard" on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS.
It were indications "HP" and "HP (HPLIP)" that were merged around april in Dapper after many bug reports.

To me it is more than clear now that different manufacturer indications cause lots of user confusion and problems.
According to the PPD Specification (http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/ps/5003.PPD_Spec_v4.3.pdf) a manufacturer must use the same *Manufacturer name string in each of their PPD files. Also, the string must be unique among manufacturers; two or more manufacturers may not use the same string. This Specification also provides a list of the current known manufacturer
strings which says that for Hewlett Packard printers the *Manufacturer: "HP" must be used!

The "Hewlett-Packard" manufacturer indication comes from PPDs installed by package foo2zjs.
Also a "MINOLTA-QMS" manufacturer indication is used in PPDs from package foo2zjs while package foomatic-filters-ppds uses "Minolta" in its PPDs.
Also a "Dymo" manufacturer indication is used in Dymo.ppd included with cypsys package while "Dymo-CoStar" is used in PPDs from package foomatic-filters-ppds.

I think this can easily be verified in e.g. CUPS webinterface, developers should do this before releasing a new version of Ubuntu and make the necessary changes in the Debian packages containing prebuilt PPDs.

I'm reopening this bug and reassigning to foo2zjs.
Changing description to: HP PPDs installed by foo2zjs should use *Manufacturer: "HP"

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

As "lpinfo -m" gives the manufacturer name for the sub menues in printer setup frontends in the second column I tried

lpinfo -m | grep Hewlett

on current Edgy and got no output at all. So the problem seems to be solved at least for HP.

I have foo2zjs, all foomatic* packages, and linuxprinting.org-ppds installed.

The problem of having too many printer drivers in the distro and letting some drivers be downloaded by printer setup tools from linuxprinting.org is about to be fixed upstream at FSG where I am doing the printing work, especially joining linuxprinting.org with FSG OpenPrinting and printing in LSB. See

http://www.freestandards.org/wordpress/?p=224
http://www.freestandards.org/en/OpenPrinting/SummitLexington

If all works fine, perhaps it will be done for 7.04 but at least it will come in 7.10.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

See also the specification proposal

https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/printerdriverautodownload
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PrinterDriverAutoDownload