[cups.development] Future of PPDs in CUPS

[Michael Sweet]

On Feb 3, 2012, at 3:34 AM, Tim Waugh wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> There has been talk¹ of the PPD concept going away in CUPS 1.6.  What is
> planned for this?

What I find interesting is the amount is mis-information in that thread, and the lack of consultation/questions pointed my way.  Oh well, another mailing list to subscribe to...

> Presumably this is related to the IPP Everywhere effort?  Will it mean
> that it will be possible to change the default page size of a queue
> using an IPP request with only attributes, without needing to adjust PPD
> file as is currently necessary?


I will respond in detail on the printing-architecture list shortly, but to summarize:

1. You can already change the defaults (since CUPS 1.4) without editing the PPD by setting any xxx-default attribute with a CUPS-Add-Modify-Printer request.  These get applied to incoming jobs when the corresponding attribute is not specified.

2. PPDs are not going away in CUPS 1.6, we are just flagging the APIs and interfaces as deprecated to start the (long) process towards independence from PPDs.  The bulk of that is focused on IPP Everywhere, although I suspect (on Linux at least) we will still have and support drivers for older printers for many years.

3. CUPS 1.6 includes some new APIs (not fully implemented yet in trunk; almost there) that allow an application to deal with finding available printers and providing the equivalent functionality for IPP that we have with PPD files.

_________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer, PWG Chair