Re: Printing packaging rework 2020
On Thu 30 Jan 2020 at 16:48:37 +0100, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote:
> Dear Till and Brian,
Thank you, OdyX, for including me. It is more than possible I will miss
some of the nuance in your mail but I hope there will be something of
value in my response.
> (I'm currently at pre-FOSDEM miniDebConf in Brussels, if any of you is around,
> let's chat!)
>
> With the blessing of driverless printing, it seems we're now in a world where
> most (%-age ?) printers sold in the last (how many?) years support driverless
I would say 100% of popular network printers available for users to
purchase in at least the past five years have AirPrint. For our
purposes this is the defining aspect of driverless. A number of devices
is USB only.
> printing. Support is not perfect everywhere, but we've come such a long way
> that, with a recent printer, on a normal network, it just "pops" in CUPS and
> its interfaces, and printing "works", in mere seconds.
That's perfectly correct. However, from my observations in user forums,
driverless does not have the visibility amongst users one would like or
expect. One reason is that the GTK print dialog deals badly with IPP
printers.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/1509
A second reason is that a change in cups-browsed.conf is needed for a
printer to show up in the GTK dialog and users are unaware of this. A
consequence of both these infelicities is that users immediately seek a
driver solution. OTOH, IPP printers are immediately enumerated in Qt
apps and LibreOffice without cups-browsed.
> But the Debian packaging (task-print-server, cups, …) still installs _a lot_
> of printer drivers and other related packages. Although in the past I was
> convinced we needed to make sure that _all_ printer drivers should be
> installed everywhere (hence the creation and usage of the printer-driver-all
> meta-package), I'm getting more and more convinced that we should reverse this
> course and install "just" what's needed to print driverless to a network
> printer in "most" cases.
This looks like a viable plan, but it would be good to have some printer
applications to go along with testing and see how this would work out.
> I have started laying down my plan on the Debian Wiki:
> https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Printing/2020DriverlessByDefault
>
> I'd love to get input from you to know if:
> a) that's something desireable;
> b) the way I thought of it makes sense;
In general I like the proposals. However, hopefully cups-browsed would
not be needed if the fix for the GTK print dialog works out. They also
seem to fit in with upstreams's vision:
https://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/liaison/openprinting/presentations/cups-plenary-may-18.pdf
At first sight, Option A seems closer to something I would prefer.
> What are your thoughts there? Do the work directly in experimental, and
> iterate until it's satisfactory?
Sounds good.
Regards,
Brian.
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