brother-hll6200dw-aur is DEFUNCT

I discovered that Arch Linux works pretty well with the Brother HL-L2600DW(T) essentially "driverless", thanks to CUPS and generic drivers.

Folks, let this be a lesson to everyone when it comes to printing on Linux: if you can print fine without specific printer drivers, then keep going driverless. I was trying to be smarter than I needed to be. Many people much smarter than me (and more importantly are basically getting paid to) are involved in CUPS development.

I got this idea after reading a thread on the Arch Linux forums from May 2022.

I was never able to make my PKGBUILDs to work, but I'll still put them up for record keeping, before making this repo read-only.

Below is the original README

Here are some notes I have for myself while adopting a package on the AUR that was very inactive.

Printer drivers aren't philosophically deep, but I'd like to spell out some pieces of knowledge that most AUR users are laconic about.

Some background

Brother has a proprietary license for the LPR driver, which is used for network printing, and an open source license for the CUPS driver, which is all you need if you will only print locally via a direct USB connection.

Brother makes separate versions of its drivers: .rpm/RPM and .deb/DEB. Looking at a handful of Brother printer drivers on the AUR indicates that the preferred archive format is RPM.

Clarification

The ArchWiki has info on packaging Brother printer drivers. There seems to be a split in approach between the DEB and RPM drivers. On one hand, the DEB drivers can be packaged separately, where the *-lpr driver and *-cups driver are 2 separate packages. This seems much easier to write the PKGBUILD, but not as convenient as having a single AUR package from the RPM. However, on the other hand, the RPM needs to be carefully managed with a patch file, since both the LPR and and CUPS drivers need to be installed simultaneously for the AUR package to function properly. (Yet somehow there are plently of counter examples to the latter?)

Due to this, I have stopped trying to make the RPM package work. Instead, I will try to make the DEB versions of the drivers work, since that approach appears much easier for a beginning AUR package contributor.

How to find the exact download links

1. This is the download preparation page for the CUPS wrapper, before downloading.
2. This is the download landing page after clicking to agree with the EULA:

   https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadhowto.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=hll6200dw_us_as&os=128&dlid=dlf102429_000&flang=4&type3=561
   

   (Exit out of the "Save as..." prompt, if it appears.)
3. Take dlf102429 from the download ID dlid= value (i.e., dlid=dlf102429) with the archive name of hll6200dwcupswrapper-3.5.1-1.i386 to get the download link:

   https://download.brother.com/welcome/dlf102429/hll6200dwcupswrapper-3.5.1-1.i386.deb
   

(The DEB archive was chosen here, though the same applies if you choose RPM.)

The same method applies to the LPR driver, without loss of generality.

This method is handy, in case the dlid= value ever changes between CUPS wrapper/LPR driver versions.

(I wrote this all out, since the ArchWiki article didn't spell out how to obtain the exact download URL for each archive, respectively, and I wanted to look this up if this happens again the next time I update the AUR packages.)

Improvements

I added the proprietary Brother license as license-custom-brother.txt for the LPR driver and the GPLv2 license as license-glp2.txt for the CUPS driver.

I changed the checksum (for file integrity) from MD5 to b2sum/BLAKE2, in accordance to guidelines for making a PKGBUILD on the ArchWiki.

Long note on not using detached GPG signatures for checksums

Of course, I am aware that this should ideally be verified using a detached GPG signature for these BLAKE2 checksums, but the most stringent GPG users would then ask for my GPG key to be signed by the Web of Trust, which isn't feasible for most people, who can figure out how to use GPG. I'd have to get my signing key signed by well-known people, such as Richard Stallman or Laura Poitras, and that isn't going to happen. Plus, cryptography professor Matthew D. Green) and Moxie Marlinspike have separately written about the worst of every timeline converges with GPG: how unforgiving GPG is due to its lack of usability and how easy it is to make mistakes with GPG means that most people (especially those that are non-technical) should steer clear of GPG; thus, GPG has and is mostly used to sign software for those under the most stringent security models: such is the case for Mullvad VPN, for those who need a VPN (and not anonymity) and Qubes OS, as a few examples. Even Tails doesn't show the GPG instructions anymore in 2022. GrapheneOS entirely forgoes GPG in its installation process without any loss of security.

But alas, there are no upstream Brother GPG signing keys or even checksums.

Credit

Credit goes to Jordan Selanders/ProfessorChill for making brother-hll6200dw on the AUR and inspiring me to make an AUR package.

Also thanks to the ArchWiki authors who wrote up how to package Brother printer drivers for the AUR - there may not be a catch-all Brother driver (like in Debian), for Arch Linux, though at the least installing each printer is probably more manageable and better than installing a multiiprinter driver package that includes many other printers you will never use.

License

This PKGBUILD is licensed under the GPLv3 license. (I will remove this license if this license if licensing modified versions of PKGBUILD is not appropriate.)