On Sat, 21 Mar 2020 02:08:22 -0400
Snidely Whiplash <therealgrogan@...> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 4:04 PM E. Liddell <ejlddll@...> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 19 Mar 2020 14:06:34 -0400
> > Snidely Whiplash <therealgrogan@...> wrote:
> >
> > > You can't completely remove CUPS on a Linux distribution, because it's a
> > > hard dependency for a lot of things.
> >
> > General-purpose binary distros fold CUPS in and include support for it in
> > everything because they want to be a "plug-and-play" experience for people
> > who know nothing about Linux.  Linux without CUPS, however, is certainly
> > possible--the Pi3 blinking happily to itself above my desk has never had
> > CUPS installed, because it doesn't need it in order to fulfill its role.
> >
> 
> It depends what packages you install from a distribution of course. I meant
> in context of desktop usage. Any desktop environment you install from
> distro packages is likely to have Cups libraries as a dependency. Similarly
> for software like LibreOffice (I compile my own and have to pass
> --disable-cups on this system.)

Any desktop environment?  Let's see:

TDE?  CUPS should be optional, barring bugs.

XFCE?  Nope, no CUPS deps in the base environment (not even optional).

LXDE/LXQT?  Same.

Mate?  Same (granted, packages for it are a bit out-of-date in Gentoo)

Gnome?  Needs a patch to make CUPS fully optional for gnome control center,
    and there are a couple of other optional dependencies.

KDE?  CUPS is required unconditionally by xdg-desktop-portal-kde.


So only KDE and Gnome could be said to require it, and Gnome is a bit
iffy.

Of course, Gentoo is not a binary distribution.  With the package manager
compiling pretty much everything locally, I have a lot more freedom, at the cost
of slower installation times.

Interestingly, even gutenprint can be compiled without CUPS support, although
I'm not altogether sure why you'd want to.

E. Liddell