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

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 04:54:10PM +0200, Jan Claeys wrote:
> 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.

In my opinion, the complexity simply isn't justified.  I would rather have
the default installation stay at its current size than to write a custom
printer detection and driver retrieval subsystem for Ubuntu in order to make
it some megabytes smaller.  Yes, it's possible, but it isn't worth the time
we could spend doing other things.

-- 
 - mdz