Port HPLIP to Qt5 as Qt4 is deprecated

[Till Kamppeter]

The Ubuntu standard installation does not contain the Qt4-based GUI parts of HPLIP, it only contains the core parts (printer and scanner drivers, CUPS backends, PPD files, and command line tools). This was originally done due to restriction onto the space of one CD. Currently, in the age of DVDs and USB sticks this restriction is dropped and I am reconsidering including the GUI in the standard installation (Ubuntu bug 802304). The problem I am hitting now is that the GUI is bassed on the deprecated Qt4 which we do not want to pull into the standard installatioin.

So can you port HPLIP to Qt5? This would improve a lot on acceptance in Linux distributions and also help for integration on space-restricted mobile devices or appliances.

[Dmitry Shachnev (mitya57)]

+1, I want to remove pyqt4 from Ubuntu's main at some point, so we will need this even if we won't include the GUI on the images.

Differences between PyQt4 and PyQt5 are described here: http://pyqt.sourceforge.net/Docs/PyQt5/pyqt4_differences.html.

[Suma Byrappa (suma-byrappa)]

Thanks for the suggestion and the interest in including it in Ubuntu installations. We will consider this.

Regards,
Suma

[Matthias Schuster (shalokshalom)]

Any news about that ?

[AP (punt18423)]

Since this request was made in 2015, has anything happened? Hplip cannot be installed on 20.04 because qt4 is no longer in the repo. It is, therefore, no longer just a wishlist item. It is now a necessity that qt5 be used.

[gdp77 (gdp77)]

I use Mint 20 (fully updated) which is based on Ubuntu 20.04.

Even latest hplip 30.2.9 which claims mint 20 support, won't install fully as there are missing dependancies regarding python qt4. The problem is that qt4 is depricated and won't work correctly. Please move hplip to qt5.

The other option (I don't know if this is possible) is to try provide hplip as flatpak, snap or appimage.

[NLin TKO (nl-gaijin)]

Trying to install hplip 30.2.9 on Ubuntu 20.04.1 results in error messages stating that Qt5 is not available (missing dependency). There are a couple of bug reports about this, e.g. #1898412.

[FeRD (Frank Dana) (ferdnyc)]

Here at the very end of 2022, HPLIP now fully supports PyQt5 for its GUI (in addition to preserving PyQt4 support, for some reason)... just in time for it to now need porting to PyQt6! (And/or PySide6, aka "Qt for Python".)

So, I guess dealer's choice whether this bug gets closed, or morphs into a "please port to a Qt6 Python implementation" request.