[cups.general] Why not "recommend" PPDs in the NickName?

[Tim Waugh]

On Tue, 2007-01-23 at 23:08 +0000, Till Kamppeter wrote:
> I also think that a central supplier of knowledge and information about 
> printer support like the OpenPrinting database (former 
> linuxprinting.org) should recommend drivers (and not only list the 
> working ones).

I think so too -- but I think it should only do so programmatically.
There is certainly a problem when a better driver, unknown to foomatic,
is available but foomatic recommends a different driver to the user.
This situation can occur with native non-foomatic drivers, and with
manufacturer's PPDs.

Foomatic isn't in the right place to make the final decision, but it
certainly must provide information about which is the best *of the
drivers it knows about*.  The tricky part is how to get that information
to the right place in the decision-making process.

> Can the CUPS/printing maintainers of the other distros please comment, 
> too. Thanks.

For Fedora we use system-config-printer 0.7.x, which parses the foomatic
XML data and discovers recommended drivers that way.  Because of this,
we don't pay any attention to what the NickName says about recommended
drivers (we actually strip that out already).

So we could already use a rating system based on the XML.  But I was
hoping to drop the XML parser altogether and use an entirely CUPS-based
approach, and in that case there needs to be a way for foomatic to pass
its recommendations/ratings through CUPS in a different place from the
ppd-make-and-model attribute.

Tim.
*/

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