hplip, under some circumstances that I can not pinpoint, may remove the user who runs it from all groups except his default group and lp. Long story short: Yesterday I wanted to print on a HP machine. I installed hplip, connected the printer, started hplip and run `hp-config_usb_printer 004:004` to setup my printer. I didn't know or expect at the time to be detected automatically. During the setup process hplip asked for my root password only for me to find later, while trying to su, that I had been removed from all groups except lp. I guess it ran `usermod -G lp` instead of `usermod -a -G lp`. I try to reproduce this behavior so I can be more specific, alas I fail. I can't get hplip to ask for my root password again. I am on a ~amd64 system. Sorry I can't provide more information. Reproducible: Always
Created attachment 333742 [details, diff] distros.dat patch I think that this patch may fix the issue but I couldn't replicate the problem in order to test it.
I did look up the code and there are three occurrences where usermod is called. check.py base/queues.py installer/core_install.py check.py looks up the information in installer/distros.dat and if nothing is there it prints a log message. installer/core_install.py looks up the information in installer/distros.dat and if nothing is there nothing happens. base/queues.py which I think is responsible for the issue looks up the information in installer/distros.dat and if nothing is there it executes: usermod -Glp username So the "-a" is missing here. Your patch should fix the issue for Gentoo, but I think the queues.py should be fixed as well. From looking up installer/distros.dat Suse seems to be the only distribution which does not add the "-a" flag. So leaving it out in the general case seems wrong.
This is fixed in hplip-3-13-10.