Bug#879491: cups: printing 3 copies of every page

[Julian Gilbey <jdg@debian.org>]

Package: cups
Version: 2.2.5-2
Severity: important

(I'm labelling this as "important" because it's wasting large amounts
of paper.)

This is a weird bug, and I have little idea how to track down the
cause.

About a week or so ago, on my Debian testing system, printing commands
started producing three copies of every page on my local printer (so a
2-page document would come out at 3 copies of page 1 followed by 3
copies of page 2).  This is the case in at least all of the following
circumstances:

* Connect the printer with a USB cable, print via usb://...
* Connect the printer with via ethernet, print via dnssd://...
* Print from evince
* Print using lpr (eg: echo hello | lpr)
* Going to http://localhost:603/ and doing Maintenance -> Print Test Page

However, going to http://localhost:603/ and doing Maintenance -> Print
SELF Test Page only produces a single page of output!

I have updated cups to the latest version today (2.2.5-2), and that
has made no difference, and nor has deleting the printer from CUPS and
reinstalling it.  The PPD files have not changed in about a year
(except for the uninstalling and reinstalling, and even that installed
an identical copy to the existing PPD file).

So I'm at a bit of a loss as to the cause of this.  I also don't see
anything obvious in the log files, but I may be missing something.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

   Julian

-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers stretch
  APT policy: (500, 'stretch'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.13.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_GB.UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_GB.UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages cups depends on:
ii  cups-client            2.2.5-2
ii  cups-common            2.2.5-2
ii  cups-core-drivers      2.2.5-2
ii  cups-daemon            2.2.5-2
ii  cups-filters           1.17.9-1
ii  cups-ppdc              2.2.5-2
ii  cups-server-common     2.2.5-2
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]  1.5.64
ii  ghostscript            9.22~dfsg-1
ii  libavahi-client3       0.7-3
ii  libavahi-common3       0.7-3
ii  libc-bin               2.24-17
ii  libc6                  2.24-17
ii  libcups2               2.2.5-2
ii  libcupscgi1            2.2.5-2
ii  libcupsimage2          2.2.5-2
ii  libcupsmime1           2.2.5-2
ii  libcupsppdc1           2.2.5-2
ii  libgcc1                1:7.2.0-11
ii  libstdc++6             7.2.0-11
ii  libusb-1.0-0           2:1.0.21-2
ii  poppler-utils          0.57.0-2
ii  procps                 2:3.3.12-3

Versions of packages cups recommends:
ii  avahi-daemon                     0.7-3
ii  colord                           1.3.3-2
ii  cups-filters [ghostscript-cups]  1.17.9-1
ii  printer-driver-gutenprint        5.2.13-1

Versions of packages cups suggests:
ii  cups-bsd                                   2.2.5-2
pn  cups-pdf                                   <none>
ii  foomatic-db-compressed-ppds [foomatic-db]  20171012-1
pn  hplip                                      <none>
ii  printer-driver-hpcups                      3.17.9+repack0-1
ii  smbclient                                  2:4.6.7+dfsg-2
ii  udev                                       235-2

-- debconf information:
  cupsys/raw-print: true
  cupsys/backend: lpd, socket, usb, snmp, dnssd