[cups.bugs] [HIGH] STR #3588: System hangs while printing

[Hadmut Danisch]

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[STR New]

Hi, 

for several months I am having the problem, that cups does not finish
print jobs. 

- System: Ubuntu, 9.10 and 10.04

- Printers: HP LaserJet 1320 (usb) and HP LaserJet 1300 (network via
ethernet->usb printer driver)


- Problem: Especially when printing from PDF files with xpdf, evince and
so on the printer hangs while printing (sometimes even at the first page)
and remains blinking. No error message at all at the Linux machine. In
contrast, works right if I convert to postscript manually and print with
lpr -l (i.e. without print processing). 


That problem already cost me lots of time and headache. 


The main problem is, that cups resists all attempts to debug. It is
virtually impossible to properly trace the way of the print job. 

As far as I know it goes through

/usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftopdf
/usr/lib/cups/filter/cpdftocps
/usr/lib/cups/backend/hp

which is undocumented and just a guess after an strace. No idea what
exactly cups is doing with the print job.
 
However, I tried to simulate this, but was not yet successfull. The fact
that these programs (for whatever silly reason) require an argument to be
passed as ARGV[0] to execve makes it impossible to simply test it from
command line. 

But it's worse. Even when I hack a programm to call it with the first
parameter as the program name, the backend dies with a segfault after
reading models.dat, I guess some magic environment variables are missing. 


Besides the fact that cups is for months unable to complete a print job on
my printers, this weird structure makes is extremely time consuming if not
impossible to debug it. This is bullshit. 

Why would it be impossible to write the parts of cups just in the way
almost all other software is written as well? Simple programs that can
simply be called from command line for debugging?

Is there any chance to get this problem fixed and cups back to printing?

regards

Link: http://www.cups.org/str.php?L3588
Version: 1.4.3