3.21.2 contains binary locatedriver and prnt/plugins/*.so

[Didier Raboud]

The 3.21.2 _source_ tarball contains (again) binary-compiled programs (locatedriver) and printing plugins (in prnt/plugins/*.so).

This is clearly unacceptable in an opensource release tarball.

[shivani mandora (shivani1708)]

Hi ,

We have made print plugins as open source in 2017. Also locatedriver is a command line utility to get the family classes for models. So it is according to the design only.

[zdohnal (zdohnal)]

Hi Shivani,

thank you for responding to this bug.

IMHO the bug is still valid for several reasons:

1) The source tarball must contain only files needed for compilation and installation and all binaries must be created via compilation - locatedriver and print plugins violate this rule.

2) 'locatedriver' binary can be created by compilation of hplip, but having it precompiled in a source tarball is against of what source tarball must contain (it is called 'source' and 'locatedriver' isn't a source file, it's a product of compilation).
Plus serving 'locatedriver' as a precompiled binary doesn't work across all platforms... it will work only on OSes which have the same libraries which you compiled 'locatedriver' with right now. If a platform will have a newer/older libs than you used during compilation, locatedriver will not work for them.

3) would you mind directing me to the source files of print plugins in HPLIP source tarball? Unfortunately I haven't been able to find print plugins source files in HPLIP source tarball... if there aren't any, then print plugins aren't open sourced - only adding precompiled shared objects to the source tarball unfortunately doesn't make them open source.

Thank you for all your work and looking into this issue!

Zdenek

[zdohnal (zdohnal)]

So I would propose the following:

Ad locatedriver - remove the binary from source tarball, let OS to decide during compilation whether they want to have locatedriver compiled or not.

Ad print plugins - remove binaries from source tarball, and provide source files for them and add the code for their compilation in Makefile.am to make them open source.

If you cannot provide source files for plugins, ship them (together with scanning plugins) in a different tarball, with more opened license agreement than current plugins have, so distributions can package them separately from free and open sourced HPLIP and put it into a non-free repository (f.e. rpmfusion-nonfree).