Documentation clarification for CUPS newbie

gcr quaternion at comcast.net
Mon Aug 7 05:43:32 PDT 2006


I plead guilty to having originated this thread, and I'm rather surprised --- perhaps I shouldn't be --- that a seemingly innocent question regarding how a document was worded has turned into a mini-controversy.

The good news is that I've gotten out of this thread pretty much what I came for, namely, to find out if WINDOWS does or doesn't support CUPS. The answer is, depending on your perspective, a qualified "yes" or a qualified "no."  For my home network, CUPS is about all I could possibly ask for: it supports printing across two operating systems with minimal setup effort --- that's about as good as IT gets  --- so for me, the answer is certainly "yes," sans qualifier.

Turning now to the adequacy of the CUPS documentation, the Software Administrator Manual says flatout that CUPS does NOT support WINDOWS.  Although that statement seemed erroneous, at first, based on my experiences with my computer, I suppose that that may be justifiable. For my own purposes, one printer on a two computer home network, the impact of only partial WINDOWS support seems the absence of an authentication capability, which is no biggie on my home mini-network. But CUPS wasn't written just for home users' mini-networks --- it's intended all kinds of networks including quite complex ones, and for sizable networks, a flaw in authentication could be a big problem. Given that drawback, the documetation's assertion that WINDOWS is not supported is certainly "not incorrect," and may justifiably be regarded, by some, as quite adequate.  Still, I find myself agreeing with the guy from Easy Software who conceded that the documentation is out-of-date. Given that Easy Software developed CUPS, I view that assessment as coming straight the horse's mouth, in which case,  why not take the horse at his word, update the documentation, and make an end to all this confusion.

I was challenged earlier to provide particulars of just how the documentation should be reworded, but I thought I covered that ground in my post immediately preceding the challenge, where I said: "why not simply mention in the CUPS documentation that WINDOWS networking with CUPS is questionable owing to only partial IPP support, rather than flatout asserting that such a capability is non-existent."  What more am I supposed to say? That should be more than enough for the CUPS documentation people to make the necessary revisions.

gcr




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