Regarding to Denis Dupeyron's comment #8 in bug #183022 the ebuild for net-print/hplip-2.7.6 should tell the user after the installation by e.g. an einfo message that the init script /etc/init.d/hplip is removed and not needed anymore and that the user should run `rc-update del hplip` to remove the link from the runlevels. Otherwise some people could wonder why they get an error message at boot time that this script can't be found.
Done, thank you. Denis.