This bug was reported upstream six years ago. A patch was submitted by
a user in that same report. Still today the patch has not been
integrated upstream. This is not just some oscure corner case
bug. It’s a fundamental failure of basic options that every user
experiences.

There is a long list of bug reports that come with patches and it
seems a lot of patches are not getting integrated:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/hplip/+patches

It seems as if HP is in over their head or relatively inactive. Not
sure if there anything Debian can or should do about that, but thought
it should be highlighted here in the Debian BTS.

It’s worth noting that the upstream bug tracker is rightfully
mentioned in the man page and in the reportbug submission dialog, but
not on:

https://packages.debian.org/<release>/hplip-data