Bug 430834

I'm building sane-backends-1.0.18-21.fc9 in Rawhide now with the dependency
removed. Future updates in the stable Fedora versions should pick that up.

Works in Fedora 9.  Removed both HP packages and it didn't nuke xsane.  Thank
you.  My bandwidth provider thanks you too.

IMHO this is completely broken. Now HP scanners don't work out of the box anymore.

(In reply to comment #3)
> IMHO this is completely broken. Now HP scanners don't work out of the box
> anymore.  

Details?

The details are that one has to install the libsane-hpaio package by hand these days because there is nothing dragging it in anymore. (The printer drivers are not installed by default anymore because CUPS now has PackageKit integration (which didn't work in KDE last I checked, but that's a separate issue), but SANE has no such thing.) But if you think that's OK, I'll just shut up.

I'm not sure there's an ideal solution, at least I don't see one right now. If somebody installs the "Graphics" group (during installation or with "yum groupinstall"), then libsane-hpaio is installed. But if somebody only installs the sane-backends package, libsane-hpaio doesn't get installed and in that case a device needing that won't work. Adding the requirement back to the sane-backends package is only a band-aid -- it was removed for a purpose, i.e. so that people can cleanly get rid of libsane-hpaio (which has substantially large other dependencies) if they don't have such a device.

X11 drivers are in a similar situation -- only because the "xorg-x11-drivers" meta package (which requires all other driver packages) is always installed does all graphics hardware work out of the box. The difference is that most people simply install the "X Window System" group during installation and not a subset of individual packages afterwards.

A possible solution could be a soft dependency on libsane-hpaio (once RPM has this feature), or if there where a generic way by which the system (udev in conjunction with PackageKit?) would autonomously install driver packages necessary for installed hardware.

If you have another idea how to tackle this, I'm all ears ;-).

(In reply to comment #6)
> I'm not sure there's an ideal solution, at least I don't see one right now. If
> somebody installs the "Graphics" group (during installation or with "yum
> groupinstall"), then libsane-hpaio is installed. But if somebody only installs
> the sane-backends package, libsane-hpaio doesn't get installed and in that case
> a device needing that won't work. Adding the requirement back to the
> sane-backends package is only a band-aid -- it was removed for a purpose, i.e.
> so that people can cleanly get rid of libsane-hpaio (which has substantially
> large other dependencies) if they don't have such a device.
> 
> X11 drivers are in a similar situation -- only because the "xorg-x11-drivers"
> meta package (which requires all other driver packages) is always installed
> does all graphics hardware work out of the box. The difference is that most
> people simply install the "X Window System" group during installation and not a
> subset of individual packages afterwards.
> 
> A possible solution could be a soft dependency on libsane-hpaio (once RPM has
> this feature), or if there where a generic way by which the system (udev in
> conjunction with PackageKit?) would autonomously install driver packages
> necessary for installed hardware.
> 
> If you have another idea how to tackle this, I'm all ears ;-).  

You make a good point about the xorg drivers.  The machines I have came with integrated Intel graphics but, wanting dual monitors, I installed Radeons.  The driver package for Radeons already existed so I didn't need to install that.  There is value in that.  Yes, I'm aware of the Vesa driver.

Anyway, if it makes his hardware work, just bundle it in.  Having hardware work is probably better than permitting the removal of unneeded packages.

So there really isn't a good solution so go with the solution which results in working hardware.

Cheers.