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

[Marcelo Ricardo Leitner]

Hi all,

+1 to the recommended informations for mainly 2 reasons:

a) Indexing printer drivers is already done for years (thanks Google). What
makes the difference is just this: the feedback from users and a fine
tunning in what is best, what works with what.

b) Why complicate and make every one try every driver at least once to see
which one gives the best results? Just becose a few wrong hits?
So let's disable our L1/L2/Lx caches as it certainly misses >1%.
For this point, I think "Recommended" is fairly clarifying but maybe another
warning saying "Recommended by other users, it may not work for you. If not,
please, try other drivers and after fill the form at www to help us improve
our knowledge base" would make the missed hits a bit less messy.
Windows users are happy to see only one driver, mostly provided by printer
manufacturers and thus are known to work. But when we come and show a list
to the user, we must provide him some information for initial guiding.

IMHO it is worse to give options and no clarifying informations than give a
hint that works probably >90% and that big warning.

About the way we should this, I have no problem with the current way, but
also I would support a new and better one.

That's my 2cc,
Thanks,
Marcelo.

On Wed Jan 24, 2007 at 11:57:50 +0000, Tim Waugh wrote:
> 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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