[cups.general] Interesting link....perhaps a bit provocative ;-)

[wtautz]

Kurt Pfeifle wrote:
> wtautz <wtautz at cs.uwaterloo.ca> wrote (Wednesday 26 July 2006 22:10):
>
>   
>> http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
>>
>> interesting read ;-)
>>     
>
>
> Hey, that's a a really, really, really old story :-)
>
> At the time I really appreciated Mike for his ability to respond in 
> such a friendly and positive manner (and I still do it now).
>
> Because what ESR picked as the prime for his rant (Mike + the CUPS 
> developers), should in fact have hit the Redhat packagers much more.
> But they did escape without a single scarf :-)   
>
> ESR in fact was ranting about Redhat and mainly had the problems he
> described because his distro never offered him a CUPS config tool 
> or a default out-of-the-box config file as is shipped by CUPS, but 
> instead their horribly broken (at the time) printer-config tool (or 
> whatever its name is).
>
> What made my own CUPS-friendly blood boil at the time was that ESR
> himself is the highly praised author of some patronizing writings 
> such as "How to ask Questions the Smart Way" [1] and then IMNSHO 
> being enough of a smartass to not follow his own advice... (I hope 
> Mike can at least silently grin for himself when I say things he'd 
> never say personally himself, not even in private).
>
> ESR of course still had a point, but he used a really wrong way to
> put it. And of course, if he had meanwhile swapped some of his IPO 
> shares that once made him rich [2] for Redhat ones (warning: I'm 
> merely speculating here, I have no evidence at all :), his 
> motivation to criticize Redhat was much lower -- so, to make a big 
> PR splash, it was OK to rather go for the much weaker CUPS 
> developers...   ;->>
>
> The more serious thing about that topic is, that I see a very, very
> similar scenario with the Ubuntu fork of CUPS. They've badly b0rken
> a few well working CUPS standard features --- but for their users
> it looks like "CUPS is a piece of cr/\p"...   I'd not wonder at all
> if one nice day another ESR-like "CUPS horror" piece would show up
> on Slashdot or elsewhere, this time with somebody trying to get
> his CUPS network at home work on Ubuntu...
>
>   
Yes, this is aggravating. I have read a enough docs that for me it's
fairly easy to understand but that's only because I've spent enough
time. A little granny would still be blown away by what's needed.

One of the really vexing things about Ubuntu/Debian is they disable the
web interface but tell you how to activate it in
/usr/share/doc/cupsys/....well sort of.
As a specific instance if one does not do adduser cupsys shadow then one
finds
that typing in a password fails silently. Also key generation for
/etc/cups/ssl
doesn't happen without some specific intervention (I see that cups 1.2.2
at www.cups.org now does this) but do they tell you this in
/usr/share/doc/cupsys....
NOOOOO. It may be useful for cups to give better feedback on errors or
failures..

walter

> Cheers,
> Kurt
>
>  [1] http://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
>  [2] http://lwn.net/1999/1216/a/esr-rich.html
>
>
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