[cups.general] An idea how to provide CUPS Browsing for CUPS 1.6

[Michael Sweet]

Bob,

Sent from my iPad

On 2012-11-24, at 6:01 PM, Bob R <br4email-cups at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 
>> Indeed, and with the exception of browsing and some charset issues I think our history of backwards compatibility has been great. But each of these things has known workarounds...
> 
> Where do I find the "known" workaround?

Search the message archives.

For charset issues, the old message catalogs encoded the default charset in 1.1.x and earlier. Just change the first line to utf-8.

For browsing on older clients, enable printer sharing on the 1.6.x server as before, then configure one or more clients running 1.5.x or earlier with the BrowsePoll and BrowseRelay directives to broadcast the shared printers.

> ...
> System 4: A mac book air, running Mountain Lion (OSX 10.8) and CUPS 1.6svn, client only. Why a svn release, ask Apple.

Timing. We do our best to sync up cups.org and OSX releases, but sometimes we aren't completely in sync, and the version of CUPS in 10.8 is a few revisions different than 1.6.0 (all changes that do not affect OSX but were needed for Linux and other platforms...)

> Current situation: I can get both macs to auto discover the laser printer, under kind, it reports "Bonjour Shared". If I do some terminal commands, I can get the mac-mini to see the inkjet. But no matter what I do, I try "cupsctl BrowseLocalProtocols=dnssd" on the acer and all sorts of other things, the mac book air will not see the inkjet printer. I have no idea why the laser printer is seen but not the inkjet, postscript or because CUPS 1.6 is backward compatible with 1.3 but not 1.4? ?  Does anyone have any suggestions? Is there anything I can do so CUPS 1.6 client works with the CUPS 1.5 server?

Absolutely, add the printer manually on OSX through the IP printer pane in the print and scan prefs (click + to add, customize toolbar if needed, click on IP) Alternately, use one of the various add-ons to register DNS services for each of the queues so they appear in the "nearby printers" list...

> ...
> Even if cups server broadcasting protocol is "bad" and needs to be discontinued, I do not understand why CUPS 1.6 client couldn't listen like 1.5, keeping some backward compatibility.

First, the two code paths are intertwined, and second the automatic queues created by CUPS browsing don't work with sandboxed applications (introduced in 10.7...)