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Re: Print Alternative



>>>>> "Gustavo" == Gustavo Noronha Silva <kov@debian.org> writes:

[...]

Gustavo> Having seen the code for the beast, I don't know if it does the
Gustavo> Right Thing. It uses the 'print' alternative to find out what
Gustavo> spooling system is being used. So if /usr/bin/print points to
Gustavo> /usr/bin/lpr, the currently used daemon is lprng, if it points
Gustavo> to /usr/bin/lp, it is using cups (I'm not very familiar with
Gustavo> printing systems, though, so I may be wrong with the names and
Gustavo> all that).

Which is sort of stupid, because if you have cupsys-bsd installed, you
get /usr/bin/lpr too.  And someone could make /etc/alternatives/print
point to that.  There must be some better way of detecting which system
is being used.  e.g. checking the presence of /etc/cups

Is it just me, or is this the wrong way to use alternatives?  lpr and lp
have very different command line syntaxes.  Especially for important
things like selecting which printer to print to.  Something like that
shouldn't be handled by alternatives.

Gustavo> It would not be a problem if we could only have one spooling
Gustavo> daemon at a time, but that does not seem to be the case for
Gustavo> Debian. I see cupsys conflicts with newer versions of lprng,
Gustavo> but it will allow lpr to be installed.

Eh.  If you have more than one spooling daemon installed, then it's not
clear what the tool should do.  Better to make a config file that says
which system to configure.  Or just configure all of them.

Besides, everyone should be using CUPS anyways, right? ;-)

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