[cups.general] ANNOUNCE: Foomatic 4.0.4 released!

[Till Kamppeter]

Foomatic 4.0.4 is released and now available for download [1].

This release fixes several bugs and drops the need of libgs (shared
library of Ghostscript).

Most importantly, we have removed the linking of foomatic-rip against
the libgs library. It really caused more problems than it had benefits.
First, this required users and packagers of Linux distributions to
compile Ghostscript with the shared library. This is not very easy and
can have negative impact on other software which uses Ghostscript. It
also requires the license of foomatic-rip being compatible with the
license of libgs which would require us to change the license of
foomatic-filters when the license of Ghostscript gets changed. In
addition, there were problems with building and packaging foomatic-rip
for Mac OS X. These problems should be solved with this release. The
libgs has no real advantages in its programming interface (API) as the
command line call of Ghostscript has, so we have switched to calling
Ghostscript via command line now.

We also improved the documentation and the comments in the source files
to more clearly show that foomatic-filters is published under the GPL v2
and later, to avoid any doubts or confusions in the future.

There were also several bugs in foomatic-rip: Insertion of CUPS page
logging code for CUPS was not suppressed on the request of the PPD file,
the "pdftops" utility of Poppler did not get called correctly when
incoming PDF had to be converted to PostScript due to the needs of the
driver, settings of numerical options did not get applied correctly, and
foomatic-rip could crash when PPDs got treated by the "alignmargins" script.

Also foomatic-db-engine got several improvements and bug fixes.

Especially, PPD generation got much faster as we avoid generating a full
list of all printer/driver relations whenever a PPD for a given
printer/driver pair is generated.

It also not required any more that for Foomatic to return a PPD file for
a given printer/driver combo that there is an XML file for both the
printer and the driver. One XML file (either printer or driver) is
enough when this file describes the printer/driver relation.

The listing of all available PPD files for CUPS ("lpinfo -m") showed
some ready-made PPDs as Foomatic PPDs leading to have duplicate
listings. This is fixed now.

Extra "*cupsFilter" lines in the PPDs for print jobs from Mac OS X are
removed again, as they caused problems for xome printers.

If a Foomatic PPD file is for a color printer but with a monochrome-only
driver, the device properties in the PPD file are set to
monochrome-only, as the PPD file is not only for the printer but for the
printer/driver combo.

The tools to get printer XML files out of PPDs are improved in some points.

The README file is updated to reflect the most recent changes in the
Foomatic XML database format and needs for the OpenPrinting web server.

Thanks to everyone who reported bugs to us or sent feature requests.

Have a lot of fun with the new Foomatic release!

    Till


[1]https://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting/database/foomatic