[Printing-architecture] OpenPrinting News

[Till Kamppeter]

On 13/10/2021 12:28, Zdenek Dohnal wrote:
> Hi Till,
> 
> thank you for the news!
> 
> A note regarding the news:
> 
> Ad GTK temp queues and cups-browsed usefulness - the feature is 
> implemented only for GTK3+, so apps with older GTKs still needs a 
> permanent queue for local printer (f.e. gimp and thunderbird). 

We are already transitioning to GTK4 and there are still apps using 
GTK2. Does GTK/GNOME upstream still provide fixes for GTK2?

> Additionally, Brian Potkin from Debian found out some problems with 
> ipp-usb supported devices [1], does it work in GTK3 apps in Ubuntu?
> 

I can reproduce his problem on Ubuntu 21.10. I have answered his bug 
report. It can also be a bug in CUPS or ipp-usb. The "driverless" 
utility of cups-filters at least can correctly communicate with the 
printer and obtain a PPD, whereas CUPS (2.3.3op2) seems to have problems 
(error when creating queue with '-m everywhere"). So most probably CUPS bug.

> And some apps (f.e. firefox) started to use their own print dialog 
> without temp queue support [2], so cups-browsed is still needed for them 

I have checked in Ubuntu 21.10 and seen that FF has now a print dialog 
like Chrome, and Thunderbird has this dialog now, too. Nice that they 
add print dialogs with preview but why do they stay so hard on this 
obsolete API?

> and Qt...
> 

Is there anyone who does anything with the print dialog?

> Additionally, cups-browsed still is the only one automatic way how to 
> get printers from non-local server, until I'll get a time to get my 
> hands on CUPS profiles, together with load balancing, clustering and 
> high availability features of cups-browsed.

What do you mean with this? Do you have any intentions to improve 
cups-browsed? Or even to move parts of its functionality into CUPS?

    Till