[cups.development] notifiers and subscriptions

Jerome Alet alet at librelogiciel.com
Tue Jun 20 16:02:02 PDT 2006


Hello,

I'd like to play a bit with notifications and subscriptions.

However, from reading CUPS (1.2) source code, it's not clear to me
if CUPS automatically detects new notifiers, and if one can
be added dynamically (if possible) besides the 'mailto' notifier,
or if restarting and/or recompiling CUPS is the only way. 

Also with regard to subscriptions, the documentation is not very 
clear about what can be done and if the actual behavior can  
be extended in some way without recompiling CUPS or not.

For example I'd like to have notifications be sent in a machine 
readable format, as opposed to plain text which probably vary 
depending on the user's locale settings. 

In particular I'm interested in having a program of mine receive 
notifications whenever a printer is deleted or added. 

I can do this easily using the mailto notifier and a script of mine 
launched from /etc/aliases. However the input format and the 
messages' contents is not clearly defined. 

Having a way for CUPS to send notifications like :

--- CUT ---
DELPRINTER printername
--- CUT ---

or 

--- CUT ---
ADDPRINTER printername
--- CUT ---

or even 

--- CUT ---
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<notification>
  <action type="delete">
    <printer>HP2100</printer>
    ...
  </action>
</notification>
--- CUT ---

would greatly simplify things (from end users' point of view), IMHO.

The current CUPS notification system seems to be directed
exclusively towards human beings. Am I right ?

Could such things be done now ? In the future ? 
If not why ?

Thanks in advance for any answer

Jerome Alet





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