No filters being applied to jobs sent to remote printers

[Chris]

I'm using cups ver. 1.1.23-12 on Debian linux 2.6.10. I have added a remote postscript/pcl printer via smb:// URI and it works fine (prints test page, postscript documents). The MIME type of printed file is discovered and logged, but no filters are being run on any job sent to that printer.

I've examined the sources and found out that any job sent to remote printer bypasses the filtering mechanism. I am curious why it was designed to work this way? Is the policy to delegate all job filtering to remote printers? If so, why bother with PPD files for remote printers?

scheduler/job.c:StartJob():1251

  if (printer->raw)
  {
   /*
    * Remote jobs and raw queues go directly to the printer without
    * filtering...
    */
   /* ... */
    filters = NULL;

scheduler/printers.c:SetPrinterAttrs():1284

  if (p->type & CUPS_PRINTER_REMOTE)
  {
   /*
    * Tell the client this is a remote printer of some type...
    */
   /* ... */
    p->raw = 1;