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

[Till Kamppeter]

Michael Sweet wrote:
> Till Kamppeter wrote:
>> Johannes, I am of exactly the same opinion as you. I think it is very 
>> important that if there is more than one driver for one and the same 
>> printer model that unexperienced users are guided somehow which driver 
>> they should choose. Or one should even hhave the possibility to offer a 
>> beginner's mode in a printer setup tool which shows only models and not 
>> drivers and the tool selects the driver (This I did in printerdrake in 
>> Mandriva Linux).
> 
> Right, and that does *not* require the word "recommended" in the
> NickName, which (without proper context) is useless and misleading.
>

I can add one or more "*Foomatic..." keywords for drier type and 
recommendation info. WDYT?

>> 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).
> 
> What is the sense of listing non-working drivers?
> 

I do not list or want to list non-working drivers, I list all drivers 
which somehow work. If a new better driver appears I mark it 
recommended, so that users know which driver works best.

>> Mike, if you do not like the way how I guide unexperienced users by 
>> putting information into the OpenPrinting database, please tell me in 
>> which form I should provide the info about which driver is the best for 
>> a printer.
> 
> I suspect a rating system that accounts for how well the driver
> supports a printer's features, whether the driver is a native CUPS
> driver or a Foomatic-based Ghostscript driver, and suitability for
> various types of printing (text, graphics, photos) would be the most
> useful.  Then your helper application can choose the best match based
> on what the user wants the printer for (with preference for native
> CUPS drivers...)
> 
>  > I am open for any suggestion to improve the OpenPrinting
>> database. And in my opinion it must be possible for an unexperienced 
>> user to set up a printer by selecting only the model and not requiring 
>> from him to know what a driver is and which one is the best.
> 
> I agree completely.  However, the current mechanism ("recommended" in
> the NickName) is completely arbitrary and usually wrong.  For example,
> a Foomatic driver should NEVER be the recommended driver when a vendor
> PPD or CUPS-based driver is available, since Foomatic drivers do not
> work with Windows clients or page accounting.
>

The CUPS-internal page accounting works with foomatic-rip, I have only 
discovered now that at Ubuntu they have disabled it.

What do you mean with Windows clients? Clients which use a PostScript 
driver for Windows and the PPD of the CUPS queue? Or a special CUPS for 
Windows software? What exactly does not work with a foomatic-rip-driven 
queue when a job comes from a Windows client?

Manufacturer-supplied PPDs for PostScript printers I usually always 
recommend, and if they are on OpenPrinting, you get them when 
downloading the recommended PPD file. But even here is an exception: The 
HP LaserJet 1320 is a PostScript printer with rather weak hardware power 
and users complain about that it is not performing well with PostScript 
and recommend using it with a PCL driver, like HPIJS. Due to such 
exceptions the OpenPrinting database should give hints to the users.

CUPS raster drivers integrate much better with CUPS, but one cannot 
recommend them in all cases, as for example for recent HP PhotoSmart 
printers. The CUPS raster driver which makes these printers work is 
Gutenprint (model selection HP DeskJet 990), but Gutenprint does not 
support advanced features like borderless or duplex, whereas HP's HPIJS, 
which unfortunately is not a CUPS raster driver, supports these features 
(in Atlanta HP guys promised to also make a CUPS raster driver of HPIJS, 
but it never appeared up to now).

Probably ratings like there are currently for the printers ("Perfectly" 
.... "Paperweight") should be assigned to the printer/driver combos and 
as the preferred driver the one with the highest rating should appear. 
The ratings could even be done separately for text, drawings, and 
photos, and the setup tool could create more than one queue if there are 
different best drivers for the different tasks.

In addition the drivers should get some extra fields, like "from 
manufacturer", "free/non-free", "IJS/CUPS/OPVP/other" ...

This will give much more information to the user, but it makes also 
things more complicated, especially several thousands of printer/driver 
combos need to be rated.

One step which I have already done to reduce the number of drivers is 
that I have marked drivers as obsolete if they get eplaced completely by 
other drivers.

    Till