[lsb-discuss] [Printing-summit] Printer/driver testing andcertification

Till Kamppeter till.kamppeter at gmail.com
Mon Aug 21 07:00:25 PDT 2006


Dan Kohn wrote:
> Jens, thanks for your thoughts.  In short, the LSB Certification  
> process consists of self-testing, combined with as comprehensive a  
> test suite as we can build.  The results of the test suite are  
> uploaded to the LSB.  We're not looking to test the printers (or  
> apps, or distros) ourselves.
> 
> For printing, the test suite could be as simple as a fancy Postscript  
> file, with lots of fonts, graphics, odd Postscript features, etc.   
> The bigger focus, though, would be on agreeing what is a reasonable  
> minimum set of PPDs to ship with a certified distro, 

Perhaps here a certain set of "most common drivers" like HPLIP,
Gutenprint, PostScript PPDs from common manufacturers, ... should be
defined.

> and then  
> building the infrastructure for a semi-automated download of the PPDs  
> for printers that are not included.  That is, a printer could be LSB  
> Certified if it either 1) plugged in and just worked on a certified  
> distro or 2) plugged in and after confirming that it was OK to  
> download and install a PPD from linuxprinting.org, just worked.
> 

linuxprinting.org should then provide distro-independent binary LSB
packages of all free drivers AND the PPDs, so that PPD and driver can be
downloaded.

> The model here is that Certified for Windows print drivers can be  
> automatically downloaded from Microsoft as part of the printer driver  
> install process (although, for various reasons, this rarely works as  
> well as it should).
> 
> I don't think I'm suggesting anything radically new here, other than  
> a commitment by FSG management to work with the printing vendors and  
> distros to get them engaged in a printer certification process.  It  
> will be up to Till and the printing workgroup to define exactly what  
> the test suites will entail.
> 

So we should start in this thread to think about what the test suite
should contain and continue the discussion on the Printing Summit.


In the tests of distros a script like Johannes Meixner has presented
here should check whether the distro contains the basic set of drivers
and PPDs and whether for each PPD there is the appropriate driver present.

In the test of printers it should be checked whether the driver is
available on the distros and/or on linuxprinting.org and certain use
cases should be tested. Within a use case test one or more test
documents should be tested with certain typical sets of option settings
and every result rated with a level from 1-4 as suggested by Robert Krawitz.

We also need to decide from whom we should accept printer test results:
manufacturers, distros, 3rd-party driver developers, users, ...

   Till




More information about the lsb-discuss mailing list