[cups-devel] [UNKN] STR #4412: From Avahi broadcast one cannot tell whether a printer is default printer on the server

[Till Kamppeter]

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[STR New]

Formerly, when CUPS used its own broadcasting and browsing the default
printer on clients could be determined by the server's default printer.
Especially if there is one server sharing printers and one of the shared
printers is the default printer on the server, clients which had no own
local queue set as the default printer automatically had the server's
default printer selected as their own default printer.

With CUPS broadcasting and browsing having been replaced by Bonjour
broadcasting this does not work any more and I got the following bug report
at Ubuntu:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cups-filters/+bug/1313748

User's original text:
- ----------
If the printer server defines one of its printer queues as default
(<DefaultPrinter ...> tag in printers.conf), cups-browsed ignores this. The
printers.conf entries generated by cups-bowsed all have <Printer ...> tags.

This is a problem when the server defines a lot of queues and standard
users do not know how to set the default printer themselves. Admins need a
way to set the default for them.
- ----------

I was trying to find out how to solve this in cups-browsed, which is now
handling the Bonjour broadcasts of remote CUPS servers and have find out
that one cannot tell from the Bonjour broadcasts whether the announced
printer is the default printer on the server or not. So I do not have the
needed information available for cups-browsed to select a default printer
on the client.

So with this bug report I want to ask for adding this information to the
broadcasted Bonjour record, either by setting the CUPS_PRINTER_DEFAULT bit
in the "printer-type" bitfield in the TXT record or by adding a new item
for this to the TXT record, like for example a boolean "default" which is
set to T if the printer is default on the server and to F if not.

Can this be done? I am very grateful for that as it makes simple, common
setups (1 server and several, usually queue-less, clients) much easier to
manage.

Link: https://www.cups.org/str.php?L4412
Version: 1.7-current
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