Comment 7 for bug 1133486

(In reply to comment #3)
> Had the same problem. Looking at the output from hp-check -t I found:
>
> hp-check -t
> ...
> Current contents of '/var/lib/hp/hplip.state' file:
> Plugins are not installed. Could not access file: Permission denied
>
>
> /var/lib/hp actually has permissions 644 after the upgrade to 3.13.2
>
> Changing it manually to 755 (sudo chmod 755 /var/lib/hp) solved the problem
> for me.
>
> I have reported this also on the hplip bug tracker:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/hplip/+bug/1133486

The Gentoo ebuild does not alter permissions of /var/lib/hp. Recently there were permission issues with /var/log/hp which have been fixed.

Looking at the source code there is the following in base/g.py:

in hplip-3.12.10a
if not os.path.exists('/var/lib/hp/') and os.geteuid() == 0:
  os.makedirs('/var/lib/hp/')
  os.system('chmod 644 /var/lib/hp/')

in hplip-3.13.2
if not os.path.exists('/var/lib/hp/') and os.geteuid() == 0:
  os.makedirs('/var/lib/hp/')
  cmd = 'chmod 644 /var/lib/hp/'
  os_utils.execute(cmd)

Maybe this change caused the issue. Probably it did not work before and now it does. However a directory shouldn't have 644 permissions at all.