Good morning, Andreas! On Sun, Jun 08, 2014 at 07:15:36PM +0200, Andreas K. Huettel wrote: > Am Sonntag, 8. Juni 2014, 17:48:09 schrieb Alan Mackenzie: > > . What is all this trying to tell me? I've tried for over an hour to > > make sense of it, but my eyes just glaze over. My best guess is that > > cups-filters and foomatic-filters are packages which can't be installed > > together. But I _need_ foomatic-filters - otherwise my printer doesn't > > print. Or do I? cups-filters seems to be needed by cups.
> > What _are_ cups-filters and foomatic-filters? emerge -s is little help > > here. Why do I need both of them? > * cups-filters is a former part of cups that provides file format conversions > (among other things). Basically it (also) makes sure that everything is > internally converted to PDF. It's not part of CUPS (as maintained by Apple) > anymore, but hard-required by CUPS on Linux (and maintained by the Linux > Foundation). > * foomatic-filters is a set of printer drivers, basically. > * Some time ago the cups-filters maintainers took over maintainership of the > foomatic-filters part for CUPS as well, and integrated it cleanly into cups- > filters. That's the reason for the blocker; recent cups-filters contain the > newest foomatic code available. The former separate foomatic-filters package > is now unmaintained. Thanks! That was brilliantly clear and informative. > So, we have the following possibilities for installation: > 1) normal CUPS user, recommended, this is what comes by default (unless you > do > something stupid such as USE="-*") > net-print/cups > net-print/cups-filters[foomatic] This is what I now have. > 2) NOT recommended, dead code, unmaintained: > net-print/cups > net-print/cups-filters[-foomatic] > net-print/foomatic-filters > 3) for the stone age people out there, NOT recommended, dead code, > unmaintained: > any other printing system, e.g. lprng > net-print/foomatic-filters I had lprng when I first installed Gentoo (2010). It just worked (with apsfilter(?s) rather than foomatic). Was forced, with regret, to switch to cups when libreoffice stopped supporting traditional print spoolers. > So, what's wrong in your case? No idea, but after longish not-updating things > do get hard for emerge to unravel. My recommendation is, since foomatic- > filters and cups-filters are only needed for printing and emerge runs fine > without them, force-remove both and let emerge figure out the right package > set from scratch. This worked! I now have printing. > [This basically works with any blocker as a last resort, but can be *very* > dangerous for packages that are needed by the core system. You definitely > don't want to remove gcc or glibc this way, for example. :)] > emerge -aC net-print/cups-filters net-print/foomatic-filters > emerge -uDNavt --backtrack=100 world I've not plucked up the courage for the world emerge, yet. But the original bug was that I had to get --debug output from emerge to see that it was the foomatic/cups stuff that was clashing. This wasn't contained in the normal, somewhat obscure, emerge error messages. > Cheers, > Andreas > -- > Andreas K. Huettel > Gentoo Linux developer (council, kde) > [email protected] > http://www.akhuettel.de/ -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
