[cups.development] are there any plans for this ?

[Michael Sweet]

On Jan 4, 2010, at 3:11 AM, christoph beyer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> sorry to bother you on the development list, I just would like to know if there are any plans to implement this in the future:
> 
> In my environment I have 600+ printerqueues on a campus with ~4.000 users, obviously I can not put all these queues on one cupsserver,

Obviously because???  We have users with 10,000 print queues and as many users...  Combine this with allowed user/group lists and you can very easily have automatically-available printers with users only seeing the queues they have access to.  The main thing is that you'll need to have network user accounts, otherwise the user/group mappings will be impossible to manage.

Also see below.

> ...
> Though most of my users just use 3 to 6 printers in there building and maybe a plotting machine or a virtual log queue. Best solution for them would be the windows-like approach to browse the printers on the server and make an individual selection by clicking on the queuenames. Unfortunately if you add a single printer from a remote cups server the printer type information and queue presettings are not transfered to the client instead the user is bothered with the usual questions (what kind of printer and so on) which is for most users not acceptable.
> 
> Are there any plans to change this in the future and does it sound like a reasonable feature-request ???

OK, so this is actually supportable today using Bonjour - the CUPS server advertises the available printers via Bonjour, and the user can (on Mac OS X and Winodws, at least) select a printer to use without specifying drivers.  We don't auto-add printers like we do for CUPS browsing, so you avoid users seeing 600 print queues.

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Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer