[buug] Managing without CUPS

Rick Moen rick at linuxmafia.com
Sat Sep 8 11:08:56 PDT 2012


I wrote:

> Quoting Tony Godshall (togo at of.net):
> 
> > Might be worth trying to revive PDQ
> > 
> >   http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Printing-HOWTO.html#PDQ-WHICH-SPOOLER
> > 
> >   http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Printing-HOWTO.html#PDQ-OVERVIEW
> > 
> > which Rick says stagnated around 2006:
> > 
> >   http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/printing-setup.html
> 
> Yeah, I was thinking of mentioning that.
> 
> Seems as if Ian has nicely reimplemented the idea, though!

That page (printing-setup.html) is overdue for a thorough refactoring,
isn't it?  As it stands, it's sort of an old attic of lore about solving
printing problems, including problems with lpr/lprng, both of which are
obsolete and should not be touched with a 50-foot barge pole other than
putting in shim utilities so more-modern printing subsystems (usually
CUPS) can offer a emulation of the lpr service interface to processes
that expect it.

People might forget just how nasty lpr and lprng were.  Yes, CUPS is a
_little_ overengineered and overfeatured, when you just want basic local
printing, but count your blessings.

And, by the way, although the PDQ project was revived by Jeremy C. Reed
in 2006, I see that it's not had any commits since 2006, either.  Rats.
In rare cases, this means a codebase is mature and doesn't have any
overwhelmingly worrisome bugs needing fixing (e.g., procmail), but I
wouldn't count on it.

http://pdq.sourceforge.net
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdq/

Anyway, there's room in Unix for two alternative print systems, one with
queuing, accounting/job-control/priorities, and print-serving to remote
users on other systems elsewhere (CUPS), and a second one that just...
prints.  

PDQ had a lpr-empulation service interface and a gtk-based
administrative and setup utility (xpdf).  Quoting the SF.net project's
description:  'pdq is a straightforward, flexible print system with
modular driver and interface, monitoring, per-user configurations, and
root privileges not required. Supports AppleTalk, BSD LPD, efax,
hardware. Works with Foomatic and PPD. X client also available.'

That really did hit the sweet spot, I think.  Shame it hasn't been
maintained.



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