After reading the discussion about printer "drivers" (I use quotes due to the different definitions of the term - obviously we aren't talking about kernel drivers here) I've been thinking about how to manage such things. I've used proprietary printer drivers in the past myself, printers are things that sometimes just get added to a network without the sysadmin being consulted (it works for all the Windows systems) and then we are stuck with making them work for so many years that the manufacturer stops providing software updates and it needs shared objects that aren't even supported any more.
It seems to me that Docker and similar technologies are a good solution to this. They can encapsulate the shared objects needed (a driver from a badly made .deb or from a .tar.ge won't stop "apt autoremove" from removing things it needs), and deal with architectural issues (I probably don't really need the full overhead of multi-arch just to have an i386 printer driver running on an AMD64 system). Docker etc all have security features that cups lacks which are needed to prevent the (presumably badly written) printer driver from having exploitable security flaws or from just using all memory or disk space. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/ _______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list [email protected] https://lists.luv.asn.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/luv-main
