Comment 1 for bug 20309

(In reply to comment #0)
> If I don't have an HP printer why should my system have 2 daemons running doing
> nothing? Maybe some solution like the one that is used with samba where the user
> is asked to install the samba package when he/she tries to setup windows
> networking would work for this?

the samba setup is different, in that you don't need a server running.
Unfortunately there is no robust way to detect the printers and then run hplip
or not. The startup time is higher, but once the daemons are started, they
should be inactive and don't hurt.

As a workaround, the hplip 0.9.4-3ubuntu2 packages do have an option to disable
starting the two daemons, editing /etc/default/hplip