[cups.development] [RFE] STR #2528: Introduce the Grand Unified Network Printer Searching Backend (or let cups-deviced merge duplicate discoveries)

[Till Kamppeter]

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[STR New]

Current CUPS comes with an "snmp" backend tofind network printers via SNMP.
Mac OS X CUPS has an additional "mdns" backend for discovery via Bonjour
and for Linux CUPS users I have written the "dnssd" backend for Bonjour
disovery (http://www.openprinting.org/download/printing/dnssd).

So the problem is the following now SNMP does not find some newer
printers, Bonjour does not find more than around five years old printers.
So a distro would need to run both backends to find backends (or evrn
introduce more backends to support more network scanning methods). Now
many printers are discovered by more than one method and so appear twice
in the printer setup tools which confuses users.

My suggestion is now to have a grand unified backend named "network" which
applies all scanning methods and returns every found printer only once or
let cups-driverd merge duplicate results.

Link: http://www.cups.org/str.php?L2528
Version:  -feature