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

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Wed, 24 Jan 2007, Marcelo Ricardo Leitner wrote:
> 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.

1. Agreed on the "provide some information for initial guiding" (I.e.
"(recommended)").

2. Do not step backwards removing the multiple drivers.  We were actually
better than Windows until "(recommended)" was removed, and we could have
been perfect if we provided a comments field giving the human being
information on which driver to choose based on his needs (IMO).

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

Agreed.  And I don't even care about the big warning, it doesn't take a lot
of intelligence to know that if you have three drivers for a printer, and
just one is recommended, doesn't mean the two others won't work.  The
question everyone will have is "why".

Instead of starting a game of adding useless warnings, add enough
information so that people KNOW why a driver was recommended, and why the
other drivers exist.  What we do need is a "comments" field where one can
add information like this to the PPDs:

Examples:

FooLaser 9999 PostScript
   This driver is very fast for pure text, and very slow on images unless
   your printer has been upgraded with extra memory.  It allows the maximum
   resolution of 1200x1200 DPI to be used, which makes it the best driver
   for workloads that require high image quality.

FooLaser 9999 PCL-5e (recommended)
   This driver is very fast for text and image printing, but it is limited
   to 600x600 DPI resolution, which is not the device's maximum capability.
   It is the recommended driver for this printer as it has the best
   performance across all workloads.

The above comments apply to a real world device, btw, but I changed the
name.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh