[Foomatic] Using usb IDs for autodetection

Grant Taylor gtaylor+foodev_ieeha040804 at picante.com
Thu Apr 8 12:44:28 PDT 2004


Joe Shaw <joe at ximian.com> writes:

> From where is Till getting the info?  Does he have the hardware?  Is
> he getting the info from Mandrake users or vendors?  

All over.  The database contains a) printer specs b) printer driver
info and c) printer signatures.  Data for A and B are derived from end
user responses, driver author responses, and all sorts of other
places.  Lots of A came from vendors or someone sitting down and doing
data entry of model detail from vendor websites.

Data for C is sometimes obtained from mailed in results of a
probe-o-matic script that Till (I think?) wrote.  Probably you should
extend that and convince people to add information semi-automagically.
Perhaps make your thing correlate an unrecognized but probeable
printer with what the user eventually configures.  Just have the
config tool say "send your working printer/driver/probe details to
linuxprinting.org?" at the end.  People will do that.

> If a program were shipped with foomatic which made it simple to get
> this information (similar to what's included with XFree86 or sane),
> then I think that'd go a long way to helping solve the issue.  If
> the user is saavy enough to want to help out and send printer
> information, it wouldn't be much burden to run this program and send
> the output.

We have such a script somewhere.  Maybe in foomatic-db-engine?

If, as it seems, we should support usb id numbers instead of usb
parport profile id strings, then we should definetely add that data.

>> We also have the longstanding issue that foomatic data is slightly
>> insufficient - nobody has had a chance to add useful vendor-ppd

> Yeah, this seems like an issue.  To my novice mind, it seems like it'd
> make sense for the foomatic DB to be the canonical DB for this info.

We pretty much are; as is we are the clear source for non-ps printer
info, and we are afaik the only centralized source of dfsg-free PPD
files (although maybe cups throws them in?).  It's just that the two
are needlessly disjoint for historical reasons.

> Vendor PPDs would be fine, but they'd also need to provide an XML file
> to tell the rest of the infrastructure about it.  If Linux distributors
> were willing to standardize on this approach, it'd probably go a long
> way to enlightening the vendors.

There is a ppd-to-foomatic import program which addresses this.  One
can even then use the foomatic tools to generate a more or less
functioning PPD from the foomatic db, although that result will be
worse than the vendor one, since only schema elements which are
members of the union of the two schemas survive the transformation.

The missing thing to give the user reasonable behavior is just a
schema entry for "prefabricated ppd" and diddles in the tools to emit
and use that when available.

> I think that the difference between the previous projects and this one
> is that there wasn't an attempt at a holistic (or user-centric!)
> approach to the problem.  We're not just trying to make printers easier
> to use, but all kinds of hardware.  Printing is just one of the problems
> that I'm focused on right now. :)

Well, good luck ;)

It's a huge effort to make a the universe of free software uniformly
support all the hardware in the world.  To date the necessary labor
hasn't been available; the project lacks any hint of glamor, so nobody
wants to work on it.

But we've got at least 80% of the necessary software to fix some
worthwhile subset of the problem, so you should be able to achieve
some measure of success.

> So I guess my next question is, would you accept a patch to the XML
> files which added the tags I previously mentioned with the data?

Certainly, as long as the implementation is orthogonal to the other
usb probe data.

I'd be most interested in a patch to address the vendor-ppd thing.
Get it so we can throw the PPD files in with the XML files and have
the ppd generator, configuration, etc tools use them, and foomatic's
worst end-user "experience" problem will be over and done with.

-- 
Grant Taylor - gtaylor<at>picante.com - http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/
   Linux Printing Website and HOWTO:  http://www.linuxprinting.org/



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