job holding

[Michael Sweet]

Bill Wyatt wrote:
> I've spent the last week or so going through the Cups docs and
> source, and find that there appears to be no facility for
> rescheduling a job upon error (except FAX jobs).

That is correct.  CUPS 1.2 adds an error policy attribute that
allows you to control the action that is taken on an error.

> I'm trying to write my own backend, which I did under Solaris's print
> system with few problems. I can get it working fine - when it works.
> However, when an error is encountered (e.g. a timeout), I want to
> exit the job, and have the system reschedule some time later,
> presumeably after emailing a message to an operator. Cups currently
> simply dequeues the job.

There is currently no way to do this short of re-queuing the job
with a job-hold-until attribute that specifies the time to print.

> Cups seems to not have an error strategy - apparently every backend 
> has to manage its own strategy for sleeping, retrying, etc. And,
> although the cupsd.conf  file has a "ServerAdmin" field for an email
> field, *nowhere* is it used, other than to fill it in from the .conf
> file.

Correct - CUPS 1.1.x does not offer any type of notifications.
CUPS 1.2 adds this functionality...

> Am I right in these statements? Is there no rescheduling policy? use
> of email notifications?

You are correct.

> It seems to me the Cups system docs are fine when everything goes
> right, but are very poor at explaining what to do when errors crop
> up.

Sounds like a great thing to write up as a RFE with as many details
as possible:

     http://www.cups.org/str.php

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Printing Software for UNIX                       http://www.easysw.com