[cups.development] customized printer list per user

[Gian Filippo Pinzari]

Michael Sweet wrote:
> Um, you *can* setup per-printer authentication very easily; for
> example:
>
>      <Location /printers/printername>
>      AuthType Basic
>      Require valid-user
>      </Location>
>

According to the people who tested it, if the connection is coming
from the loopback device it is automatically accepted. Did we miss
to add some configuration to the system CUPSD?

> > could then query the server for all the printers in the system or
> > only the printers added by a given user.
>
> There is no notion of per-user printers in CUPS, mainly because
> CUPS is not something that runs as part of a user session but is
> a system service.

This should certainly not prevent the possibility that thousands
of printers are added to the local system, each made accessible
only to a set of users and each with its own printing capabilities.
It can absolutely be that we missed to use some of the features
CUPSD provides or that we didn't use them in the appropriate way.
This is surely due to lack of knowledge. The code anyway is there
and we invite all to provide their feedbacks, possibly avoiding
flame wars.

It looks to me that this whole NX-printing debate is all around
running a separate CUPSD per each user as opposed to running a
system CUPSD. I want to understand if running a system CUPSD and
adding printers as long as users logs to the system is possible
without loosing functionalities or not. I don't see what's the
point of running many if we can do with one. If this is not pos-
sible, we'll go for another solution.

> The only time it makes sense to provide per-user
> printers is for remote logins, and in that case there is no reason
> not to just point the application at the remote CUPS server since
> it is already handling the user's printer anyways.  CUPS already
> supports this via the ~/.cupsrc file mechanism and via
> environment variables (CUPS_SERVER and IPP_PORT)...

Our original idea was exactly that. Unfortunately we need to support Windows as well as Solaris and Linux, possibly using a consistent solution. Given that we quickly found that we had to print on
Windows using SMB, our point was to configure the remote CUPSD on
the server to act as a gateway.

/Gian Filippo.