Request: autoconnect on cups-control and removable-media for Banana-Accounting

#1

Hi people.

Banana-accounting is a full featured Accounting Software. (Can also do invoicing)
The snap is currently working good, but our users keep asking 2 things: “Why can I only print to PDF? Why I can’t read files from my secured USB stick?” (Evidently they did not see the “Permission” button in the store).

So I ask for the following:

  • Autoconnection on cups-control
    Printing balance, reports and invoices is an expected behavior for an Accounting Software.
  • Autoconnection on removable-media
    Accountants use to save their work on encrypted USB stick.
    Accounting files are often shared between the accountant and their supervisor, this people use to meet up and exchange their USB sticks.
#2

Note, your snap is able to detect whether or not these interfaces are connected and can guide the user towards a reasonable user experience through contextual messages (eg, if try to print, check if have access to cups-control, then if not, guide the user via snap-store, cli, whatever).

That said, while I’m not thrilled to hand out printer configuration to the snap, +1 on cups-control since accountants routinely need to print

I’m less sure about removable-media. It seems that the snap could provide better feedback to the user for those situations where users are using USB sticks (and this doesn’t seem specific to accountants). I’d like to hear from other reviewers before casting on this one.

@reviewers - can others vote?

#3

Hi there,

I agree printing is likely to be a very used functionality - the criteria we’ve applied with cups-control in the past (see gimp) means the most consistent way here would be to not auto-connect, and have the snap/application ask the user to do this manually if needed. However given that the target audience for banana are professional accountants (“Professional accounting for small companies, associations, private individuals and auxiliary accounting management.”), +1 from me on cups-control (somewhat reluctantly - see above and I would prefer to have the user make the conscious choice to allow the software to print).

I’m +1 too to removable-media, in principle the software is trusted (hey I’m trusting it with all my organization’s financials) so I think it’s reasonable to extend that trust to removable-media if it’s as frequently-used as the requester suggests; the compromise vector here would be other software getting hold of sensitive files, but restricting removable-media for banana is unlikely to help with that anyway.

  • Daniel
#4

2 votes for cups-control, 0 against. Granting auto-connection for cups-control. This is now live

1 vote for removeable-media, 0 against, 1 abstained. This is not enough to tally. @reviewers - can others vote on auto-connecting removeable-media?

#5

I’m +0 on auto-connection of removable-media, for similar reasons to @jdstrand:

I don’t object, but I do see a distinction between “core functionality” and “a common use-case”.

E.g. for a camera app, accessing the camera device vs sharing to social media: auto-connection for the former, but not necessarily the latter.

This use-case sounds more like the latter.

#6

We don’t usually grant auto-connect on removable-media for other similar apps like gimp etc - but I agree this is a bit more of a specialized use-case and this is a more trusted software package (ie. the user is already trusting it for financial information etc) so +1 for removable-media from me.

#7

2 votes for, 0 against, 2 abstained for auto-connect of removeable-media. Granting auto-connect. This is now live.

#8

Thank you very much!!!