On Fri, 2010-05-28 at 09:54 -0700, George Liu wrote:
I think it's best if openprinting.org become the "trusted" repository for all printer driver packages. Fedora (and other distros) add openprinting.org as default printer driver repository. So there's no need to maintain different packages for each distribution.
I can't really ever see that happening. It isn't the case for video drivers, or scanners, or webcams, or sound cards, or anything else you can think of, and there is a reason for that.
Fedora is about free software, and if there are drivers which are free software and should be made available to users of Fedora, they ought to be packaged for (and part of) Fedora by Fedora contributors.
Printer manufacturers who want to provide Linux drivers for their printers need only concern themselves with writing and maintaining the actual software, taking advice from the various stakeholders about how best to design it (e.g. CUPS raster driver, CUPS DDK etc).
Once written, the packaging of the drivers for each different distribution comes more or less for free: if there was a brand new free driver for new printers that was not already packaged, *I* would package it for Fedora, Till would package it for Ubuntu, etc etc.
As far as proprietary drivers go, being able to simply click on a link in a web page (to configure and enable a 3rd party repository -- e.g. like Adobe does for flash) and then plug in your printer to have the appropriate drivers installed is quite easy really.
If there were some central list of vendor repositories, perhaps that could be useful for directing the user to the right place.
But how many vendor repositories are there today?
Tim. */