Re: lprng needed by AUCTeX?
Wayne,
You are quite correct that a google search using your search terms
immediately provided the answer to my question, which arose from a bug
in the documentation (#512098). I assumed (wrongly) that CUPS was
broken, and so googled with the wrong search terms.
The tools you point to were of little help, for none of them
explicitly said that dvi printing requires cups-bsd rather than the
cups package, although now that I know that to be the case, I can see
that the documentation might imply that. While the error report
said it could not find the lpr command, a) the documentation
with the cups package did not tell me it _didn't_ supply lpr, which I
incorrectly assumed it did, and b) that dvi couldn't find the printer
configuration file when in fact I knew it existed led me to assume
that CUPS was broken and for that reason could not find lpr.
The Debian Reference was new to me and looks to be very helpuful, but
I did a quick look for this issue in it, and it does not explicitly
say (at first glance), that the cups package does not supply lpr
and so does not support printing with dvi. It simply gives an example
of printing using lpr.
I understand your frustration with questions raised by folks who do
not trouble to figure things out for themselves. But the highest
virtue of an educator, as you call yourself, is forebearance. As any
educator will tell you, people often don't pursue things on their own
because they lack the general framework needed to define the question
in a way that implies what is a meaningful answer, lack a sense of
direction in which a question needs to be pursued, or do not fully
understand the documentation even when the answer stares them in the
face.
I did struggle with the problem before raising the question, such as
googling, looking at the cups package documentation, and looking to
see if there was a PRINTER variable. Why AUCTeX/dvi relies on the BSD
command instead of vanilla CUPS is still a mystery. Everything else
managed to print with the cups package (one app. didn't, but since I
normally use it with a2ps, I didn't pursue the reason). I was focused
on whether I had installed CUPS properly and whether it was a broken
installation. In retrospect, the situation seems simple enough, but
that is with the wisdom of hindsight.
Haines Brown
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