[cups.bugs] [HIGH] STR #4238: printers.conf overwritten by cupsd

[James Cartwright]

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[STR New]

Since upgrading to 1.5.3 (the version in Debian testing), we have been
unable to stop cupsd overwriting printers.conf.

The issue is that we have a fair few printers, and our config management
system tracks which printers are managed by which hosts, and generates
printers.conf accordingly.  In version 1.4.4 this worked fine.  But with
1.5.3 cupsd insists on overwriting the file.  This results in a
never-ending battle between our config management system and cupsd over
the content of printers.conf.  

The version of printers.conf that is generated by cups advises the
sysadmin, via a comment near the top of the file, not to edit the file
while cupsd is running.  So we made sure cupsd was stopped while we put in
place the version of the file that we wanted.  But on restarting cupsd, it
still overwrote printers.conf.

We absolutely do not want to interactively configure cups everywhere via
its web interface, nor via lpadmin, and we don't really want to try and
script lpadmin in an automated way.  It just shouldn't be that hard - we
should be able to generate a declaration of the printers in a config file
and have cupsd respect that.

Link: https://www.cups.org/str.php?L4238
Version: 1.5.3