Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

Anton Blanchard might have shot Eric Raymond, and everyone might be happy, but, by Linus and the penguin that bit him, ESR's right about The Horror Of CUPS Printing. As far as I can see, the people who designed CUPS and the printconf-gui interface knew exactly what they were doing and wanted to provide a vaguely friendly interface on it, rather than actually trying to solve the problem of printing.

It all started when I upgraded the cups package and all my printers ceased to work. I found out that the package upgrade had decided that it was going to put all of the backend drivers in /usr/lib/cups/backend, but that cups itself still looks in /usr/lib64/cups/backend for them. A few symlinks later and at least the laserjet works correctly. You can read all about this in Bug 193987; basically the justification is that they're executables, not libraries, so they should be in /usr/lib. Because that makes so much more sense than /usr/bin/cups/backend, for instance.

Because of this problem, I plugged the USB printer into my testing (i386) machine and got it working. "Fine," says I, "I'll just print to it across the LAN." "Hah-hah!" said cups, "We're going to make things as difficult for you as possible!" I followed Eric Raymond's steps and managed, at least, to get cups to bind to the network interface. But it now still steadfastly refuses to either broadcast itself or let other people use it; every time I run the actual printer configuration program, it resets everything to stop other people see it too. This is just A1 weapons-grade stupid.

OK, maybe there's something screwy in my configuration. Why can't something tell me this? Why did the problem with the 64-bit backend drivers being moved manifest itself as an unknown lpr error, rather than something meaningful? Why did it appear at all? (It seems to be gone in the latest update to cups, 1.2.1-1.7, crossed fingers and touching wood.) Why doesn't the configuration un-screw itself? Why is it not Doing What I Say, let alone Doing What I Mean? And why do I seem to get no help on this at all?