apps choice for Ubuntu and installation choices [Was: cross-platform virus]

[Jan Claeys]

Op vr, 21-04-2006 te 08:35 -0700, schreef Matt Zimmerman:
> Currently, the user must select "New Printer" and (in many cases) the
> printer device is detected and the driver selected for them.  Surely you can
> see the difference in usability between this, and searching for drivers in a
> package manager.  There is no contest. 

It might be possible to split the printer detection & the drivers in
separate packages.

Make "printer-detection" a mandatory package (a dependency of
ubuntu-standard?) that is relatively small and can be updated in between
releases without causing too much traffic (requires the user to add
'ubuntu-updates' to the apt sources list).

Then, when the user buys a new printer, the "Add Printer" applet will
detect it, or ask the user to select it from the list of existing
drivers if that's not possible.
Of course, when the user selects a printer that has a pre-installed
driver it's used without further questions, but when he selects a
printer that has no installed driver yet, the user gets the choice
between automaticly downloading & installing the driver (using a GUI on
top of apt?) or, if that's not possible, the user is told how to find &
install the correct .deb (or other format archive?) with the driver for
this printer.

The default ubuntu desktop install might still install all available
drivers (and a meta-package depending on all of them), but lightweight
derivatives can just install the package that contains the list of
supported printers + where available the detection logic.


-- 
Jan Claeys