CUPS: end-user usability issues

[Michael Sweet]

m.stonebank at surrey.ac.uk wrote:
> Michael Sweet wrote:
> 
> 
>> With CUPS, each client has local queues which hold the job for that
>>  system; the local jobs are forwarded to a server for printing when
>>  that server is ready for them.  This method ensures that print
>> files are not lost if a server goes down, and allows us to provide
>> failsafe and load-balanced printing "for free".
> 
> 
> 
> Sorry, but this is a bogus philosophy.

It isn't philosphy, it is design.

> In a business/educational/realworld environment, people don't want
> their print job sitting on their local box for x number of hours when
> the print server is down.  They want their printout NOW.  They want
> to see the state of the print server to see if its up, if it has a
> large queue.  That way if there is a problem, they can decide to
> print elsewhere.

and not surprisingly you can find this information now - if a printer
is down, it shows that.  The only info you don't get is the rank of
your job on the server, which we will be adding in CUPS 1.2.

> ...
> The idea of a print server is just that - IT is the print server.
> Distributed print serving is no good if there is no way of checking
> the other clients in the distribution.

If you want things to work like LPR, you can setup the client.conf
file to point clients at a particular server.  However, you will
lose most of the benefits of the CUPS architecture in the process.

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