Printer status: stopped. This is murder.

[Kurt Pfeifle]

Silviu Marin-Caea wrote:
> This is a case where a small bad design decision destroys all the 
> good that CUPS does.
> 
> The situation couldn't be more ordinary: a USB printer (HP F4180).
> 
> If this printer is turned off when the computer is on, it will enter 
> the stopped/paused state and remain so forever.
> 
> To the average user this means exactly: LINUX PRINTING DOES NOT WORK.  
> It's as simple and clear as that.
> 
> To get it to print again, the user should give the cupsenable command 
> or use the web interface.  Do you expect mom and pop to know about
> "cupsenable" and "http://localhost:631"?  Really.
> 
> Guys, you brought linux printing forward from the middle ages.  Don't 
> leave it in the 1980s, please, we need it in the present.
> 
> Whatever might be the reason cups doesn't retry printing, is it worth 
> sacrificing usability so brutally?
> 
> openSUSE 10.3, cups-1.2.12
> 
> Thank you


Your post really sounds like you know a *lot* about all kinds of pro-
gramming.

However, even gurus need to take the time to read some basic documenta-
tions, sometime, once they encounter an area of computing they're not
soooo familiar with...   :-)

So my suggestion is for you to read up about "ErrorPolicy" at

   http://localhost:631/help/ref-cupsd-conf.html?TOPIC=References&QUERY=#ErrorPolicy

and after that, try to set your printer to use "retry-job" instead of
the default "stop-printer":

   http://localhost:631/admin/?op=set-printer-options&printer_name=silvius_printer

I don't agree with you in that "CUPS printing is in the 80s"; I think it
is well in the current century. Yes, there are a lot of small and big
things that still could benefit from improvements. But have you ever
thought about the question why so few people do actively work on develo-
ping printing software?

Printing is a very challenging and complicated area to write code for,
and it is not "sexy" (for every print spooler you have on *any* OS plat-
form, you'll have a dozen or even a hundred music players) and not much
rewarding.

That situation isn't much different on Windows, BTW. Microsoft didn't
change their basic printing architecture in 20 years, and everyone who
has to use it in a server-based computing environment (Citrix or Terminal
Services) can confirm that it is not that much of a blast.

However, there is only so much that CUPS can do about giving feedback
to the user. And the web interface is pretty good in what it does. A
user will easily see when a queue is stopped, and will easily discover
the button to restart it.

The rest of a typical Linux system (you haven't been complaining about
a Mac) is in the hands of KDE, Gnome or other GUI programmers. You
should consider to take your ideas and suggestions for improvements
there -- nowadays CUPS can tell the GUI layers more about its printers,
jobs and potential problems than these do take advantage of.

I agree that a grandma or grandpa Linux user who aren't PC experts
will not easily discover or be taught about localhost:631. But there's
not much *CUPS* can do about this. Or would you seriously ask CUPS to
provide its own (non-web) GUI for alerting users about printing problems?

-- 
Kurt Pfeifle
System & Network Printing Consultant ---- Linux/Unix/Windows/Samba/CUPS
Infotec Deutschland GmbH  .....................  Hedelfinger Strasse 58
A RICOH Company  ...........................  D-70327 Stuttgart/Germany