Wishlist: Better handling of backend error

[Hatto von Hatzfeld]

When a "backend did not respond within 30 seconds" the cups server is not
reachable, even other printers are unusable, and it is very difficult to
figure out what is wrong (cups does not tell which backend has this
problem). I suggest that this should be improved.

In case that others do not have this problem, here is my situation (which I
presented some days ago in cups.general): 

My cups server quite often (not always) fails to initialize the printer
connected to /dev/lp0 (at least that's what I suppose - the error message is
just: "Backend did not respond within 30 seconds!"). In this cases none of
the printers can be used, because the cups server itself denies all
requests (even http://localhost:631/ does not respond if e.g. I want to
change the configuration this way).

I made the server "verbose", but cannot get more helpful information than
the phrase "Backend did not respond within 30 seconds!".

Here my configuration:

(some lines from /etc/cups/printers.conf)

<Printer HPColor>
Info HP Color LaserJet 3700
DeviceURI lpd://192.168.5.98:515/LPT1
....
</Printer>
<DefaultPrinter hplaserjet1200>
Info HP LaserJet 1200 generic PS
DeviceURI parallel:/dev/lp0
....
</Printer>
<Printer hplj1200>
Info HP LaserJet 1200 Series PS
DeviceURI parallel:/dev/lp0
....
</Printer>
<Printer MFKv2>
Info Faxscanprinter MFKv2
DeviceURI lpd://192.168.5.243/printer
....
</Printer>

The difference between both printer queues of HP LJ 1200 is, that the first
is configured/filtered as "Foomatic/pxlmono (recommended)", the second as
"Foomatic/Postscript". The second is used for print jobs coming from a
Windows PC via Samba (which works fine if the cups server does not fail to
initialize).

OS: SuSE 9.2 (with Kernel 2.6.8-24.18-default and KDE 3.4.2 Level "a")

CUPS: cups-1.1.21-5.6

Ciao,
Hatto

-- 
"Wo kämen wir hin, wenn jeder sagte: 'Wo kämen wir hin?' und 
keiner ginge, um zu sehen, wohin wir kämen, wenn wir gingen?"
"Where would we go if everyone said 'Where would we go' but no
one would go to see where we would go, if we would go."