[PATCH] concatenating socket backend

[David Decotigny]

Hi,

In our environment, we have a cups server for all the Unix clients, and 
multiple windows machines printing directly to the printers that cups 
manages (blah blah "historical" reasons blah blah...). So, of course, 
when the Unix clients print their banner + document, a document from the 
windows machines might insert itself between the unix banner and the 
unix document...

Here is a quick and dirty hack against cups 1.1.22 that changes the 
socket backend so that the banner + the document are concatenated before 
being sent to the printer in one single TCP connection. If you find this 
useful, tell me, maybe I'll make it nicer. It works well on our HP 
postscript and Tektronix/Xerox postscript printers. I'm pretty convinced 
it does NOT work on any other non-postscript printer !

To test it, re-compile cups entirely cups, either make install or 
replace your running cupsd with the one compiled, this would normally 
not hurt your system unless you are not already running cups 1.1.22. 
HOWEVER I suggest you keep your old version of the "socket" backend 
installed, and that you copy the binary "socket" produced by the 
compilation, as "sockcat" in the backend/ directory of the cups 
installation. Afterwards, to explicitely tell cups to use it in place of 
the old, working, "socket" backend, replace "socket://" with 
"sockcat://" in /etc/cups/printers.conf (the web interface won't allow 
to do that).

I'm quite convinced that http://cups.org/links.php?V124 is really the 
best thing to do for that. But unfortunately I was not good at 
postscript enough to investigate why it could not print any raster 
images (eg png) while all the more "textual" postscript docs would be 
correctly printed...

Regards,

-- 
David Decotigny -- LLR -- http://polywww.in2p3.fr
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