14 ms·

What development needs to be done, other than bugfixes and security once they're found? Drivers should be able to (and do) exist outside the CUPS codebase; what

What development needs to be done, other than bugfixes and security once they're found? Drivers should be able to (and do) exist outside the CUPS codebase; what ever happened to code being finished?

nine_k 6y ago
As soon as the bug report queue has dried up, then, well, yes. Has CUPS reached the TeX nirvana?
- zaarn 6y ago
  >Has CUPS reached the TeX nirvana? No
- andi999 6y ago
  Unfortunately they choose a rational number...
zaarn 6y ago
Well, for one CUPS could be modernized. Currently CUPS is a rather poor user experience, setting up a printer is non-trivial for the average user and often enough requires digging into CUPS internals. It's configured either via an ancient and partially broken printer applet (and with broken I mean I have a reproducible crash when trying to view my printer queue before the current print has begun printing on that printer, reported somewhere in 2015 but never fixed) or via the web interface, which is broken in different, exciting ways. Sometimes printing breaks, my browser for example cannot print, it always just prints an error message (which is not logged, it's only printed, there is no way to tell something went wrong by looking at CUPS), so all prints have to be done by another utility. The code for CUPS isn't finished, it's a mess. The printing experience on Linux could best be described as "piss poor" if you're being nice about it. The best thing about CUPS one could say is "most of the time it'll have you printer do something that resembles printing your document".
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  Seconded. I'm on Fedora and it wasn't a bad experience, I had to go to the Brother website and download the drivers and run some binary blob thing as root -- not crazy about that -- but it eventually it worked. OTOH, my Win10 work laptop found it on my wifi, connected, and was good to go in about 5 minutes. Didn't have to download, extract, and run some random vendor tarball, just said 'find" and it found.
- barumi 6y ago
  > Currently CUPS is a rather poor user experience, (...) Isn't CUPS an infrastructure service that exposes a bunch of APIs for downstream consumers, such as desktop environments, to build upon?
  - zaarn 6y ago
    CUPS also provides a GUI-based printer configuration tool, which handles viewing your printers, their queues and setting up new printers. It looks not only old, it is old and not very user friendly. It also exposes it's admin interface on localhost with per-distro varying defaults on it's root password.
    - steerablesafe 6y ago
      Users in the lpadmin group can log in with their own passwords. At least on Debian.
      - zaarn 6y ago
        On Archlinux only root can login by default last time I installed it. Heavily distro dependent and just weird that it requires a webinterface to configure.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- pmontra 6y ago
  I'm pretty confident that Ubuntu uses CUPS inside. dpkg -l "*cups*" seems to agree, given the number of installed packages related to CUPS. I never had to deal with CUPS directly in all these years. I always used the GUI in Settings to find and setup printers and I never had any problem. Which distro are you using?
kristopolous 6y ago
They aren't accepting PRs, like at all and lots of it is seriously broken. I use Google cloud print instead. It goes out to the internet, then comes back, to be right next to me because cups is that broken. The bugs that would fix it, have been fixed, sitting in forks, for years, unmerged. I've literally given up. Thanks Apple
- totetsu 6y ago
  Wasn't there "an update on" cloud print not so long ago?
  - intellirogue 6y ago
    Yes, it will be turned off at the end of the year.
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      On chromebook we're encouraged to "use CUPS"...
    - kristopolous 6y ago
      Oh God. I'll have to run a fork then. I squarely blame Apple here, cups gets increasingly more and more broken
      - askvictor 6y ago
        I've moved from cloud print to CUPS-based printing at home just recently, and the latter has been more reliable (at least for the setup I've got; printer is not cloud-print native, so was using a raspberry pi as a print server). GCP would sporadically not respond to print jobs, then sometimes, days later, print them all out. The only annoyance is that the only PPD file for my printer is in German, so my print options are in German.
smt1 6y ago
Keep in mind that in physics is term, this is correct. You can optimize electric grids than a very hard usually (historically this was combinatorial optimization problem). When PDAs started becoming a hit, Apple was working on the newton, another company, General Magic, was basically created anti JVM with programming lang called Telescript and very desktop oriented MagicCap which would have empowered users to probably eventually create apps. General Magic was very innovative. Java/JVM was heavily defined in the research community in Sun (which was very innovative before Solaris lost out to the more free). Then Sun eventually after failing to monetize the JVM, was bought by Oracle. Oracle sued Google because they had used Apache Harmony (a open source JVM). For a while Oracle did nothing with Java and it feels like they were trying to milk it for $. It was basically an implicitly defined user driven decentralized JVM allowing users to create their own messages. Keep in mind these were very different days. In the semiconductor world, it was a battle between Intel and it's clones (IP). In the mobile world, things were still using more primitive microcontrollers for the most part. It was still a telecommunications problem before multiple parties in the IEEE started cooperating and fixing error codes. I guess depending on you age, you can also think about this way, It was a physicists who inspired the to justify it for energy saving reasons, but it in networking terms, these were still days of AOL sending everyone cds. Eventually AOL bought Time for their content. Keep in mind that initially the iphone didn't allow for external apps to be intended, TeleScirpt tried to empower humans and developers alike, and the company, General Magic was basically spun off of old Apple. Apple almost run out of money before buying NeXT. It feels like to me the it could possible be that Apple could have never created the iphone in the first place, or a more innoative erlier era MagicCap which did actually go out of business but great ideas with a green minded initilaized. There was no cloud back then, but there was a mini-cloud that TeleScript was designed for. It allowed any user numbers to basically upgrade the "tele phone numbers" with a tele-e-address where multiple people could basically implementation a needed set of services via this type of messaging system, which eventually could a have turned into a app into a desktop (this was the original skewmorphic dsign). Google didn't even exist at the time. I remember google beta, and even formation of the company barely escaped the com cash. I keep in mind this triangle in my head (it will be a linear standard norm triangle). The Google::Oracle lawsuit seems to be about two third party corporations allow a computation vs composition of apps by other stacks of other apps. Which one do you value more the value of that law suits numbers, the energy savings, or any combination by combinating some number of names the google::apple::sun::oracle::general magic. W️
charwalker 6y ago
I picked up an older Brother printer, laser, on CL recenlty and connected it to a pi zero 2 with CUPS. Then I had to find, download, compile an implement a third party driver (that doesn't have my exact model). It works and it's mostly on Brother for not having easy ARM/Linux drivers but still a pain. I wish I'd looked before picking up this specific model printer as I could have gone fora used Dell laser too.

What development needs to be done, other than bugfixes and security once they're found? Drivers should be able to (and do) exist outside the CUPS codebase; what ever happened to code being finished?

nine_k 6y ago

As soon as the bug report queue has dried up, then, well, yes. Has CUPS reached the TeX nirvana?

zaarn 6y ago
>Has CUPS reached the TeX nirvana? No
andi999 6y ago
Unfortunately they choose a rational number...

zaarn 6y ago

Well, for one CUPS could be modernized. Currently CUPS is a rather poor user experience, setting up a printer is non-trivial for the average user and often enough requires digging into CUPS internals. It's configured either via an ancient and partially broken printer applet (and with broken I mean I have a reproducible crash when trying to view my printer queue before the current print has begun printing on that printer, reported somewhere in 2015 but never fixed) or via the web interface, which is broken in different, exciting ways. Sometimes printing breaks, my browser for example cannot print, it always just prints an error message (which is not logged, it's only printed, there is no way to tell something went wrong by looking at CUPS), so all prints have to be done by another utility. The code for CUPS isn't finished, it's a mess. The printing experience on Linux could best be described as "piss poor" if you're being nice about it. The best thing about CUPS one could say is "most of the time it'll have you printer do something that resembles printing your document".

blaser-waffle 6y ago
Seconded. I'm on Fedora and it wasn't a bad experience, I had to go to the Brother website and download the drivers and run some binary blob thing as root -- not crazy about that -- but it eventually it worked. OTOH, my Win10 work laptop found it on my wifi, connected, and was good to go in about 5 minutes. Didn't have to download, extract, and run some random vendor tarball, just said 'find" and it found.
barumi 6y ago
> Currently CUPS is a rather poor user experience, (...) Isn't CUPS an infrastructure service that exposes a bunch of APIs for downstream consumers, such as desktop environments, to build upon?
- zaarn 6y ago
  CUPS also provides a GUI-based printer configuration tool, which handles viewing your printers, their queues and setting up new printers. It looks not only old, it is old and not very user friendly. It also exposes it's admin interface on localhost with per-distro varying defaults on it's root password.
  - steerablesafe 6y ago
    Users in the lpadmin group can log in with their own passwords. At least on Debian.
    - zaarn 6y ago
      On Archlinux only root can login by default last time I installed it. Heavily distro dependent and just weird that it requires a webinterface to configure.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
pmontra 6y ago
I'm pretty confident that Ubuntu uses CUPS inside. dpkg -l "*cups*" seems to agree, given the number of installed packages related to CUPS. I never had to deal with CUPS directly in all these years. I always used the GUI in Settings to find and setup printers and I never had any problem. Which distro are you using?

kristopolous 6y ago

They aren't accepting PRs, like at all and lots of it is seriously broken. I use Google cloud print instead. It goes out to the internet, then comes back, to be right next to me because cups is that broken. The bugs that would fix it, have been fixed, sitting in forks, for years, unmerged. I've literally given up. Thanks Apple

totetsu 6y ago
Wasn't there "an update on" cloud print not so long ago?
- intellirogue 6y ago
  Yes, it will be turned off at the end of the year.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    On chromebook we're encouraged to "use CUPS"...
  - kristopolous 6y ago
    Oh God. I'll have to run a fork then. I squarely blame Apple here, cups gets increasingly more and more broken
    - askvictor 6y ago
      I've moved from cloud print to CUPS-based printing at home just recently, and the latter has been more reliable (at least for the setup I've got; printer is not cloud-print native, so was using a raspberry pi as a print server). GCP would sporadically not respond to print jobs, then sometimes, days later, print them all out. The only annoyance is that the only PPD file for my printer is in German, so my print options are in German.

smt1 6y ago

Keep in mind that in physics is term, this is correct. You can optimize electric grids than a very hard usually (historically this was combinatorial optimization problem). When PDAs started becoming a hit, Apple was working on the newton, another company, General Magic, was basically created anti JVM with programming lang called Telescript and very desktop oriented MagicCap which would have empowered users to probably eventually create apps. General Magic was very innovative. Java/JVM was heavily defined in the research community in Sun (which was very innovative before Solaris lost out to the more free). Then Sun eventually after failing to monetize the JVM, was bought by Oracle. Oracle sued Google because they had used Apache Harmony (a open source JVM). For a while Oracle did nothing with Java and it feels like they were trying to milk it for $. It was basically an implicitly defined user driven decentralized JVM allowing users to create their own messages. Keep in mind these were very different days. In the semiconductor world, it was a battle between Intel and it's clones (IP). In the mobile world, things were still using more primitive microcontrollers for the most part. It was still a telecommunications problem before multiple parties in the IEEE started cooperating and fixing error codes. I guess depending on you age, you can also think about this way, It was a physicists who inspired the to justify it for energy saving reasons, but it in networking terms, these were still days of AOL sending everyone cds. Eventually AOL bought Time for their content. Keep in mind that initially the iphone didn't allow for external apps to be intended, TeleScirpt tried to empower humans and developers alike, and the company, General Magic was basically spun off of old Apple. Apple almost run out of money before buying NeXT. It feels like to me the it could possible be that Apple could have never created the iphone in the first place, or a more innoative erlier era MagicCap which did actually go out of business but great ideas with a green minded initilaized. There was no cloud back then, but there was a mini-cloud that TeleScript was designed for. It allowed any user numbers to basically upgrade the "tele phone numbers" with a tele-e-address where multiple people could basically implementation a needed set of services via this type of messaging system, which eventually could a have turned into a app into a desktop (this was the original skewmorphic dsign). Google didn't even exist at the time. I remember google beta, and even formation of the company barely escaped the com cash. I keep in mind this triangle in my head (it will be a linear standard norm triangle). The Google::Oracle lawsuit seems to be about two third party corporations allow a computation vs composition of apps by other stacks of other apps. Which one do you value more the value of that law suits numbers, the energy savings, or any combination by combinating some number of names the google::apple::sun::oracle::general magic. W️

charwalker 6y ago

I picked up an older Brother printer, laser, on CL recenlty and connected it to a pi zero 2 with CUPS. Then I had to find, download, compile an implement a third party driver (that doesn't have my exact model). It works and it's mostly on Brother for not having easy ARM/Linux drivers but still a pain. I wish I'd looked before picking up this specific model printer as I could have gone fora used Dell laser too.