[Foomatic] Using usb IDs for autodetection

Grant Taylor gtaylor+foodev_jgagi040804 at picante.com
Thu Apr 8 13:32:02 PDT 2004


"Kurt Pfeifle" <kpfeifle at danka.de> writes:

> You should all look at the new "CUPS Driver Development Kit", please
> released under GPL 2 weeks ago.

Yes, I saw it go by.  It will be interesting to see if vendors end up
using the thing or not.  Is it really gpl?  That might force the
drivers to be gpl, which is all well and good for free folks, but
won't generate any progress with vendors who won't ship anything but
binaries.  Their loss, I suppose; I know *I* can't recommend binary
drivers for much of anything...

CUPS has the problem that it's not suitable for some applications.
CUPS drivers have the problem that they're not as efficient or
generalized as ijs drivers.  But 98% of the time things work fine
either way.

> It allows you to develop CUPS raster and PCL drivers with associated
> PPDs. Eventually, that approach would be much cleaner than the
> ingenious Foomatic-"reroute from CUPS to Ghostscript"-hack.

Plumbing-wise the cupsraster path isn't much different; it's still gs
under there.  Foomatic's primary awfulness is that it's Perl, which is
a wee bit dippy to be running over print data.

If all this integration can get vendors to support printers better,
then I'm all for it.  But as an embedded developer, I'm not able to
use cups, so I prefer paths that can't lead to cups-only drivers.

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



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