Re: lpr/lpd

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Christoph Biedl <debian.axhn@manchmal.in-ulm.de> writes:

> Well, not me. But the thing that puzzles me is the popcon numbers:  lpr
> has 755, lprng 233.

> Assuming most of these installation were not done deliberately but are
> rather by-catch, or: Caused by some package that eventually draws them
> in, via a dependency that has "lpr" (or "lprng") in the first place
> instead of "cups-bsd | lpr". For lpr, that might be xpaint. For lprng, I
> have no idea. And there's little chance to know.

It at least used to be that you could print directly to a remote printer
with lpr and a pretty simple /etc/printcap entry that you could write
manually.  I used to use that mechanism to print to an office printer
until I discovered rlpr, which is even better for that use case.  It's
possible some of those installations are people doing that, rather than
via dependencies or other things (in which case they probably should move
to rlpr).

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>