[cups.development] [RFE] STR #3050: Transparent printing.

[Jessica Hawkwell]

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[STR New]

Feature: It would be very nice to have a transparent printing mechanism -
rather than installing the CUPS printer-specific drivers on every machine
that needs to use a target printer, only have the printer-specific drivers
on the machine said printer is physically attached to.

Purpose: This would allow CUPS clients to print without requiring
printer-specific drivers on every machine that needs to use said printer,
thus widening the printer selection on systems which not all drivers are
available, and/or improving deployment times for new printers on the
network (such as a single update in the global SVN config repo).

Background: We have a FastCGI server running FreeBSD with CUPS installed,
but there are no drivers available for the printer we are using.  This
printer is connected to a Mac which does have the drivers, but the FastCGI
server is unable to print its daily site statistics reports.

Drawbacks: This would require a unified abstraction layer with a single
print job format, with final translation to the printer's job format on
the server.  This would increase process load on the print server, but
only slightly.

Deployment: Standard software update procedures, such as cross-building
the update and committing it to the company's global software repo.

Link: http://www.cups.org/str.php?L3050
Version:  -feature