[cups.general] Isn't there an alternative?

[Johannes Meixner]

Hello,

only FYI:

On Feb 28 08:54 Thomas Mieslinger wrote (excerpt):
> For my experience everywhere where the pure and innocent data and
> algorithms of information technology hits the reality you have these
> kind of Problems. Every reality interfacing device and their software
> like printers, mice, networkinterfaces, harddrives, network cables has
> these kind of problems.

See the section "CUPS: The server between user and printer" at
http://en.opensuse.org/Concepts_printing
I use the wording "between user and printer" intentionally.

For some more detailed background information you may have a look
at the "Keep printer device info" thread on the cups.general
newsgroup (the cups at easysw.com mailing list) at
http://www.cups.org/newsgroups.php?gcups.general+T+Q%22Keep+printer+device+info%22
in particular:
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"there is no printer in the printing system".

What I mean is that there is no software representation
of the real piece of hardware in the printing system.
Actually queues and printers are very different things.
A printer is a piece of hardware.
A queue is basically a named output channel
which (hopefully) results correct output on a printer.

....

Printer management tools cannot exist.
Queue management tools exist and also special tools for
printer maintenance (like "hp-toolbox") exist
but a generic printer management tool cannot exist.
--------------------------------------------------------------------

It is not possible to implement a generic solution
(at least not with reasonable effort), see also
http://www.cups.org/str.php?L2531


> Personally, I haven't seen that another printjob queueing
> software that is better than cups.

Which is the reason why many/most/all? Linux distributions
and many other Unix-like operating systems use CUPS.

When we (i.e. SUSE) switched in several steps from LPR/apsfilter
to LPRng/lpdfilter to CUPS or LPRng/lpdfilter to only CUPS,
we expected for each switch to get at first more bug reports
but actually we got for each switch less bug reports right
from the date of the switch which means:
CUPS works better than LPRng/lpdfilter and
LPRng/lpdfilter works better than LPR/apsfilter
for very most users including enterprise use cases.


Kind Regards
Johannes Meixner
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