I have given up on there being a Nokia OS update. Alas, I think we all should.

Removing these items will have no detrimental effect on the day-to-day operation of your device (if someone knows otherwise, please explain why). This is my experience and I have installed CUPS, as mentioned above.

On mine it was -generic-pr, which I guess means pr1.3. Is '002' an initial version of the CSSU? The person who ported CUPS to Maemo mentioned something about ...-pr being something to do with the CSSU. With fakedebconf being called 'fake' implies that it is/was just a place holder (though I didn't check its contents) so replacement with a non-fake debconf didn't concern me as much as the warning about removing a 'critical package'. I think the installer is having a wobbly about removing the ...-pr file, not swapping the ...conf filein the way that windows complains when you turn off microsoft updates!

Removing ...-pr means you will have to update the OS manually and I don't think you will receive any automatic memos. This is a good point:
I do not believe it's an intentional action. My guess is that this is a result of porting a desktop programme/driver/etc to a device running an embedded/OEM OS: there are overlaps and somehow the new software has claimed right-of-way. A way to overcome this might be to integrate printing functionality into the OS itself becauseToo true!
This is a good idea because most of the time printing will be from an office document/file. However, without native support, it prevents all other programmes from accessing the print drivers. I suppose there could be a pic-to-print programme, where if one had a sketch or other non-office doc/file, a screen-shot could be created by the normal method (ctrl+shift+p) and this piece of software would be able to send it to the printer from the images folder. But then it seems a bit cumbersome and restricts output to what fits on the screen and maximum printable pixels to 800 x 400, which is pretty tiny!
I suppose the main downside of native support would be adding a print component/menu to all relevant software. Most items are oss, hence this is more easy to overcome even if a little tiresome for developers.

FAo: Maemo Council: (should any council member peruse this thread)

CUPS or another means of natively printing from the N900, merits consideration for inclusion into Maemo 5 OS updates, such as the CSSU project. Noting the size of these packages (ahem!), it might be more appropriate as an OS extension but this size is likely to be much reduced if there is any commonality of classes, library objects or other functionality.

Lastly, I'd like to repeat my wishful thinking from the other thread: it would be nice to have 'PrintWithIr', which would get around any problems with USB or BT not being natively supported but apparently there are no IR components in CUPS. It would be interesting to know whether print-data could be encoded into a suitable form to be transmitted via IR.