I just installed a print to pdf back-end for cups, and it gave the warning that foomatic printer modules would need to be removed. Do I need foomatic printer drivers, for when i want to print to physical devices?
What am I giving up here? Will I be having other problems in the near future for having removed foomatic printer support?
The only package which is pre-installed on your system is foomatic-db-compressed-ppds. ubuntu-desktop depends on foomatic-db-compressed-ppds, but the removal of foomatic-db-compressed-ppds, which also removes ubuntu-desktop, doens't destroys your system, as ubuntu-desktop is only a meta-package.
This package contains all PPD files which can be generated from the Foomatic database as one small compressed archive. This reduces the disk space consumption compared to the Foomatic XML database vastly and in addition makes listing of all available PPDs and extracting the needed PPD much faster than using the Foomatic XML database.
Both packages, cups-pdf and printer-driver-cups-pdf, don't depends on foomatic-db-compressed-ppds.
On the other side, if you need any foomatic package later by a dependency, let's resolve this problem later, if there is any.
