[Foomatic] Using usb IDs for autodetection

Joe Shaw joe at ximian.com
Thu Apr 8 12:16:47 PDT 2004


On Thu, 2004-04-08 at 10:50 +0200, Johannes Meixner wrote:
> I am sorry but I think at the moment this is a waste of time.
> At least I wasted much time with this in the past.

This seems like a rather downtrodden view on the world.  You have been
embittered by the past of printing!  Cheer up!

> Of course I understand your intention very well but you may
> find out that it is very very much work for only a little bit
> better printer setup.

I'd argue that the user experience would be greatly improved.

> 1.
> Unfortunately we (at least I) don't have many of those IDs.

For USB IDs, we have some of them in the usb.ids file, which is even
maintained by one of our colleagues at SUSE!

> I asked my colleagues, our beta testers and several printer manufacturers
> again and again to send me those strings and all I got are the IDs
> for some models so that for very most models I don't know the IDs.

Do we have an easy way to do this?  I think it'd be a lot easier to say
something like "run printprobe /dev/usb/lp0 and send the output" than it
would be to say "compile and run this program and send the output, dig
through /proc/bus/usb/devices and try to find the right thing".

> Therefore in most cases we must do string comparison of the 
> *Manufacturer and *ModelName in the PPD with whatever the USB
> or IEEE-1284 interface gives back.

I'm not saying it's an exact science, but if we could do it for 600 of
the 1200 printers in foomatic, that's a major improvement.

> 2.
> Even if we had all ths IDs for all printers which are in the
> Foomatic database we don't have them for PostScript printers
> for which we have PPDs from the manufacturers.

Yeah, I replied to Grant about this, but one thing I forgot to ask: how
common is this?  How many vendors are doing this, and how widespread are
they?  Can we pressure them into additionally providing a foomatic XML
file?

> 3.
> Even if we had all USB and parallel port IDs we still need the SNMP IDs.
> I think a real solution must work for USB, parallel port and network.

I disagree that it's an all-or-none solution.  But I do agree that this
information would be incredibly useful.

> 4.
> String comparison of the *Manufacturer and *ModelName in the PPD
> with whatever the USB or IEEE-1284 interface gives back works well
> in very most cases.

I've run into the opposite, and it seems as though every tool does it
differently.  This doesn't make much sense to me.

> > I'm not aware of an existing database which contains the IEEE-1284 data
> > for a large number of the printers, so it's not really feasible to fill
> > in the <autodetect> sections for most printers without having the
> > hardware itself.
> 
> That is exactly the problem.

Foomatic should be that database!

> > We do, however, have a database of the USB vendor and
> > product IDs for virtually every USB printer in the usb.ids file that
> > every Linux distro ships.
> 
> It seems the usb.ids on my workstation is totally outdated because
> there are at most 1% of all available USB printers listed :-(

Yeah, it looks like none of the 4 USB printers I have are listed in the
usb.ids file.  That sucks, I'll have to send them off to Vojtech.

Joe





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