Bug 117293 – OpenOffice2 ebuild dependency on CUPS should not be present

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE

[Description Phil Stracchino (Unix Ronin) 2005-12-31 10:22:28 UTC]

The ebuild for openoffice2 currently has a dependency on CUPS.  There are two reasons why this is wrong:

(1) Installing OpenOffice2 should not force use of a specific printing system.  I know for a fact OpenOffice on my Slackware install is perfectly happy to print via lprng.  OpenOffice itself, to my knowledge, cares not one whit what printing system is installed when you try to print; it cares only that one exists and is correctly configured.

(2) As a matter of fact, since it is entirely possible to use OpenOffice on a machine only to read, edit or create documents which are NEVER PRINTED from that machine, installing OpenOffice should not actually require that a printing system be installed on the same machine at all.  I know plenty of people who have OpenOffice installed on machines that aren't connected to printers at all.  I worked at one company in the past at which it was quite intentionally not possible to print at all from the machine on the reception desk, because if the receptionist printed to a remote printer, she had to leave the desk unattended to get printouts, and if she had a local printer, there was a risk of confidential documents being left on the printer in the insecure reception area.  Either was considered a security risk.

Creating and reading documents, and printing documents, are two separate functions; OpenOffice handles the first, the printing system handles the second.  They should not be conflated into one as this ebuild does, and installing an application should never force the choice of a specific printing system.  What would happen if, say, the Gimp ebuild was made dependent on lprng?  Suddenly it would be impossible to have OpenOffice2 and Gimp on the same Gentoo install, because each would mandate a printing system which Gentoo will not allow to coexist with the one mandated by the other.

In my case, I prefer lprng over CUPS.  lprng plus ifhp is lightweight, simple, and does everything I need my printing system to do.  But if I want to use lprng, I cannot install OpenOffice2, and if I want to use OpenOffice2, I cannot use lprng.  This is absurd.

[Comment 1 Jakub Moc (RETIRED) 2006-01-01 05:16:46 UTC]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 113361 ***