Package: foomatic-gui
Version: 0.7.9.3
Severity: serious
The printer setup tools provided by the foomatic-gui source package,
printconf and foomatic-gui are not usable any more in modern CUPS
environments.
There are several problems which make the mentioned printer setup tools
not working with modern CUPS environments.
1. Only PPDs generated by Foomatic are supported. Instead of asking CUPS
for available PPDs/drivers ("lpinfo -l -m" or appropriate IPP request)
it only looks up the local Foomatic XML database in /usr/share/foomatic.
This makes a lot of available drivers not seen:
a. Ready-made PPDs in /usr/share/ppd and subdirectories (PPDs for
PostScript printers supplied by the printer manufacturers, SpliX,
foo2zjs, LSB-based driver packages from OpenPrinting)
b. PPDs supplied via PPD generators in /usr/lib/cups/driver/
(CUPS Raster driver of Gutenprint, compressed PPD file archives of
newer packages, like ijsgutenprint-ppds, foomatic-db-compressed-
ppds)
c. PPD files generated on-the-fly by the CUPS DDK with CUPS DDK .drv
source files in /usr/share/cups/drv/ (HPLIP, CUPS' own PPD files).
So the newest and most sophisticated, especially manufacturer-supplied
drivers are not available through printconf and foomatic-gui. This can
lead to a lot of false bug reports due to "unsupported" printers.
At least for CUPS a printer setup tool should not directly access the
Foomatic XML data. Once, the data is available through the
/usr/lib/cups/driver/foomatic PPD generator, and second, other PPD
sources available to CUPS can be used, without taking care of them
individually.
2. (Only printconf) Use of deprecated device-based USB URIs, like
usb:/dev/usb/lp0. These URIs are not supported by CUPS any more as they
only work if there is only one USB printer connected to the machine. As
soon as there is more than one USB printer print queues (with
model-specific drivers) do not stay assigned to the correct printer
after rebooting. Therefore the new device-ID-based URIs have to be used.
foomatic-gui uses them though.
Possible fixes are:
1. (A lot of work and re-inventing the wheel) Fix the software to poll
the PPD/driver info and the PPDs itself from CUPS when CUPS is in use.
2. Let foomatic-gui and printconf conflict with the "cups" package, so
that they do not get installed on systems where the printing environment
is CUPS.
3. Remove the foomatic-gui package from Debian altogether (recommended
if upstream development has been discontinued).
Recommended replacement for CUPS users is system-config-printer.
Till
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