On Fri, 2003-12-12 at 06:53, Tim Waugh wrote: > One thing I'd like to get done for Fedora Core 2 is the ability for > redhat-config-printer to accept a manufacturer's PPD file and just use > it. It is incredibly easy to configure CUPS for this. > > The trouble is that redhat-config-printer doesn't just configure CUPS, > it manipulates an alchemist database and then a different program > writes the alchemist data out as CUPS configuration files. > > The original reason for using alchemist is, I think, no longer valid. > The idea was that it would be nice to be able to 'roll out' a printer > configuration to a whole lot of computers. CUPS browsing makes this > redundant IMHO (I'd love to hear opinions on that). I agree...I'd like to see the dependency on alchemist removed. > Ideally we could just dump alchemist and let redhat-config-printer > configure CUPS directly. Unfortunately that would mean re-writing a > lot of code -- in fact, just about all of it. > > The alternative is to find a replacement for redhat-config-printer > that *does* configure CUPS directly, and there are several candidates > I think. Whichever one is chosen would have to be adapted to be a > drop-in replacement. Kudzu likes to be able to automatically > configure print queues, for instance, and it would be nice not to make > the graphical interface any worse. And of course the text mode > interface would most likely disappear altogether. What I'd like to have is a module that I could plug into firstboot that says that a printer has been detected and configured. That would require us writing some code. If CUPS can get all the detection right without having user intervention, the the GUI would just involve the notifying that a printer has been detected and then asking them which printer they want as the default. > In the mean time, I could just add support for vendor PPDs in > redhat-config-printer by just bypassing alchemist altogether, in a > similar way to how it enables/disables cups-lpd (the tick-box just > runs chkconfig). Good idea? Sounds good to me. Cheers, Brent