[Foomatic] Using usb IDs for autodetection

Kurt Pfeifle kpfeifle at danka.de
Thu Apr 8 13:54:35 PDT 2004


Grant Taylor wrote:

> "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? 

It is, if I say so...   ;-)

> That might force the
> drivers to be gpl, 

Does using the GCC force the compile results becoming GPL? No.

To be sure, I asked Mike (Sweet) the day it was released the same
question and he confirmed that the PPD being compiled with the PPD
compiler will not be forced to be GPL'd.

> 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...
> 

I didn't have the time to look into the CUPS DDK in much detail.
But what is for sure is that it will be a neat tool to generate
PPDs which utilize the CUPS PCL raster driver with all printer
bells and whistles....

> 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.

They don't really need to. IJS is good to have bi-di communication
of Ghostscript core to external plugin, replacing one-way piping
from one to the other.

With CUPS, you have the cupsd scheduler ruling over the individual
filters and the filtering chain, so the need for bi-di communiction
isn't there to the same extend as for legacy ghostscript filtering, no?

Also, CUPS 1.2 will provide backchanneling printer messages up
to the user interface....

[....]
> 
> 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,

Why not? I don't know details, but I know it has been stripped down
by some vendor to the extend of being used as an embedded CUPS client....

> so I prefer paths that can't lead to cups-only drivers.
> 

Cheers,
Kurt





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