Subject: bug#33300: hplip 3.18.9 contains non-free binary blobs

From: Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2018 14:09:54 +0100

Ludo',

How horrid.

Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> I tried removing them with a snippet (patch attached), but 
> installation
> eventually fails while trying to link against libImageProcessor, 
> which
> is now missing.

If I correctly read the Debian maintainer's post in the bug you 
linked[0], it's possible to revert only the libImageProcessor 
infec^Waddition. If it's all right with everyone, I'd like to give 
that a try first. Say by tomorrow? Or do you want to revert first 
& ask such questions later?

> +                  ;; This trick changes the behavior of the
> +                  ;; 'install-data-hook' target so that it 
> doesn't install the
> +                  ;; binary blobs.
> +                  (substitute* "Makefile.in"
> +                    (("^UNAME =.*")
> +                     "UNAME = free-software-only-thanks\n")

Nice. I wish it worked.

Aside, -ish: looks like most distributions there found out about 
this file due to some failing sanity check. Perhaps we could add 
our own, in ‘guix lint’ or at build time, to warn about ELF files 
and other suspicious binaries in post-snippet sourceballs?

No idea if it's worth the trouble/performance hit/false-positive 
rate, of course. That's for the ner^Wgods to decide.

Kind regards,

T G-R

[0]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/hplip/+bug/1785230/comments/6