ppdi not merging common content from multiple PPDs?

[Smith Kennedy]

On Mar 3, 2009, at 9:50 PM, Michael Sweet wrote:

> On Mar 3, 2009, at 2:23 PM, Smith Kennedy wrote:
>> On Mar 3, 2009, at 12:08 PM, Michael Sweet wrote:
>>
>>> On Mar 3, 2009, at 7:49 AM, Smith Kennedy wrote:
>
>>>> ...
>>>> I thought the problem might be that the files were not  
>>>> "normalized", so tried importing one using ppdi and then re- 
>>>> generating it using ppdc, and did the same thing for the second  
>>>> one.  Interestingly, ppdi refused to import the ppds generated by  
>>>> ppdc.
>>>
>>> What errors did you see?
>>
>> There were no errors written out to stdout or stderr.  Here is an  
>> example run I did just now:
>> ...
>> Notice that there were no error messages written out by ppdi when  
>> importing hp1300_6.ppd.  But the "new.drv" file doesn't have the  
>> LaserJet 1300 in it.  I checked system.log and the console log in  
>> Console.app on Mac OS X and didn't see anything.
>
> Can you re-test with the current CUPS 1.4 release or Subversion  
> sources?

I did a little testing with CUPS 1.4b3 that was in the Snow Leopard  
seed.  The behavior seemed to be reproducible there as well.  One  
interesting thing was that it seems the PPD produced by ppdc didn't  
pass cupstestppd.  I'm experimenting with a bunch of them and will  
have better results soon.

Here's what I was doing:

cp /Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/HP\ Color\ LaserJet\  
4700.gz .
gunzip ./HP\ Color\ LaserJet\ 4700.gz
cupstestppd
ppdi -o first.drv HP\ Color\ LaserJet\ 4700
ppdc -d . first.drv
ppdi -o second.drv HP4700.PPD

It is possible that the "HP4700.PPD" file (name used by ppdc taken  
from the "*PCFileName" keyword value in the original PPD to name the  
generated PPD from first.drv) doesn't pass cupstestppd, but I haven't  
had time to really sit on this and focus.  ppdc seems to fail  
silently, though.  If it was first calling cupstestppd or was  
leveraging the validation logic of cupstestppd, then it would be  
helpful to see those validation errors rather than silently failing.   
The output I am seeing shows some kinds of line wrapping issues with  
the HP4700.PPD, but I haven't had time to dig into that yet.

Hopefully more soon,
Smith