Manjaro-printer: non-free dependences issue

Feedback
1

Hi
I’ve just updated from stable repos
manjaro-printer now depends from foomatic-db-nonfree and foomatic-db-nonfree-ppds.
This happens automatically when you update your distro, without any advise.
Now, this is absolutely unfair.
It’s unfair for the newbie, because a newbie probably will never notice that manjaro-printer force to use non-free packages.
It’s unfair for long time users that don’t want to be forced to install crappy non-free stuff (like me, I used Manjaro since 2014, and this is only one of the things that were getting worst during the years, but this is another point btw)

Proposed solution: make foomatic-db-nonfree and foomatic-db-nonfree-ppds optional dependencies

Thanks in advance for your attention

2

pkgdesc="Manjaro meta package for complete printing support"

Proposed solution: Don’t use manjaro-printer if you dislike “non-free” word for whatever weird reason and install all the other packages “by hand”.

4

Manjaro printer didn’t depends by those two non-free packages, in the past.
Now devs made non-free dependencies for a package that didn’t has them before, without any kind of advise.
This is totally crazy in my opinion, considering that manjaro-printer is installed by default in official isos.
This in crazy , and inexcusable

BTW

sudo pacman -Rdd manjaro-printer

But this really sucks, and devs needs to reconsider what a free and open source OS means

5

Overreacting much?

It seems you are under impression that all the other parts of your system are free and open source.

This is a good way to break something.

6

Underreacting?

Unfortunately proprietary blobs are a big issue. But 95% of the distros include them, no need to silently put other crap in the box

It’s devs’ fault
If I’ll broke something cause of this, Artix , Arco or EndeavourOS could became my new friend :rofl:

1 Like
7

I think this is mostly provided for user convenience and I don’t think Manjaro ever tried to be a strictly open-source distro, I mean after all, Manjaro also includes the nvidia proprietary driver in the ISO, also the Linux kernel Manjaro provides for us has binary blobs/non-free code, if it were totally free and opensource they were striving for they would probably use a completely opensource kernel like Linux-libre, but that I imagine would cause all sorts of user frustrations.

1 Like
8

With -Rdd you will eventually. :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like
9

Be careful: former depending packages installed as dependencies will now be orphans. You have to mark them as explicitly installed.

10

Nothing unfair in this. As @ydar stated, enforcing open-source has never been one of Manjaro’s objectives AFAIK.

You can try to rely on open-source packages only, nothing wrong about that. But this is something you must manage yourself.

1 Like
11

Damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

If we include things, people whine and complain. If we don’t include things, people whine and complain.

Users are free to install or uninstall any package they wish. Please do so to your hearts content.

Apparently you never noticed hplip was a dependency of manjaro-printer for years. It’s now an optional dependency since not everyone has an HP printer.

Constructive feedback and criticism is welcomed. Please try again.

Please review the forum rules: