Bug#711169: cups-daemon: ipp printer browsing support removed

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

Package: cups-daemon
Version: 1.6.2-8
Severity: normal

Somewhere between 1.5.3-5 and 1.6.2-8 the support for IPP printer
browsing was removed. This was a decision of cups upstream (i.e. some
big fruit company). Still it breaks a legitimate use case: Having
printers on a network just work. For what it is worth I have neither
avahi-daemon nor cups-browsed installed, so maybe this is just my fault.
This bug report is *not* asking for getting IPP printer browsing back,
but on getting a smoother transition.

To me the two core problems appear to be:

How to get a jessie/sid cups client talk to a wheezy cups server without
the need to configure each individual printer on the client? (my case)

How to get a wheezy cups client talk to a jessie/sid cups server without
...?

As a first step I ask for an entry in NEWS.Debian, telling users about
the issue. This helps users not finding their printing setup being
broken for no obvious reason. This might also reduce the amount of bug
reports for this issue (assuming users install apt-listchanges).

Then I would like to see some documentation on how to transition
systems. I looked at wiki.d.o only finding an outdated
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/CUPS not even knowing about odyx. I briefly
looked at /usr/share/doc/cups without finding anything obvious. Is there
another place I should check?

It is a bit unclear to me how to get a transition at all. Apparently the
cups-browsed package is not part of wheezy. So as far as I can see
wheezy is not going to talk bonjour. On the other hand jessie/sid is not
going to talk IPP browsing. How are they supposed to interact?

So this is probably a non-coding issue.

Helmut