[cups.general] Can CUPS pass through the printer status somehow

[Ambrose Li]

On 14/12/06, Michael Sweet <mike at easysw.com> wrote:
> True, however the CUPS backends do everything they can to wait until
> that job is finished on the remote end.  The fact the LPD and
> AppSocket protocols provide no reliable way to do this is not the
> fault of CUPS, and all you get with the old LPD/LPRng spoolers is
> the hack of showing the remote queue.  It is easy for you (as a
> human being) to interpret the plain text status report coming back
> from the printer, however it is not easy for the LPD backend to do
> the equivalent of an lpq on the remote printer and determine whether
> the job is still queued.

True, but as a user I would very much appreciate that CUPS show
this plain text report somehow, because even this plain text report
is immensely useful to the user. Rather than discarding unparsable
output, I (as a user) would rather CUPS give me the info that
it can't understand and essentially tell me "look, I don't know what
this stuff means, but if you know what it is, here it is!". Or in other
words the option for me (as a user) to tell the system "Don't worry if
you can't make it out. Trust me I know more than you do."

> Moreover, because network print servers (internal and external) often
> operate separately from the print engines (even for internal HP
> JetDirect interfaces!), the information you get from the device is
> not all that accurate... :(

Yes, but still it's better than nothing :-/

-- 
cheers,
-ambrose