[cups.general] cups stops itself due to rejected print file

[Michael Sweet]

Ambrose Li wrote:
> Thanks for the explanation, but a few things:
> 
> On 11/07/06, Michael Sweet <mike at easysw.com> wrote:
>> This is the expected, default behavior.  You can change the error
>> policy via the web interface or lpadmin command.
> 
> 1. I cannot figure out how to do this through the web interface,
> other than via "edit configuration file". If it is supposed to be
> easier than that, it need to be made more obvious.

Click on "printers", scroll to your printer, click on "Set
Printer Options", scroll to the bottom, choose your error
policy.

> ...
> 3. I still do not agree with client-error-bad-request stopping the
> printer for the following reasons:
> 
> (a) The HTML docs says that "The ErrorPolicy directive
> defines the policy that is used when a backend is unable to
> send a print job to the printer." The client-error-bad-request
> is not about not being able to send a print job, it is (at least
> for this case in question) about receiving malformed input.

Actually, it is an error that cannot be recovered from.  We don't
know why the request was bad, and that error should not occur
during normal operations.

Since, by default, CUPS does *not* throw away print jobs (we have
a lot of customers that depend on reliable printing...), we have
to stop the queue since the receiving end is rejecting the job with
an unknown/unexpected/unexplained error.

> (b) You cannot configure cups 1.2 to emulate cups 1.1,

The default CUPS 1.2 configuration matches the CUPS 1.1
behavior.

 > or
> configure it to emulate an ordinary Postscript printer (e.g.,
> which is connected to a parallel port), which would discard
> malformed input but would *hold* the job if it really could
> not be *sent* (i.e., paper out, offline, etc.). Doing this
> would require the error policy to be sometimes cancel,
> and sometimes hold, which is impossible but would be
> what an ordinary person would expect.

An "out of paper" condition, when detectable, holds a job for
printing as you'd expect.  The only time we stop a queue is
when we run into an error we can't explain or recover from
without human intervention.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Document Software          http://www.easysw.com