[cups] PPD API: Status, future and alternatives to handle printer-specific options

[Till Kamppeter]

On 01/31/2017 11:00 PM, Michael Sweet wrote:
> Till,
>
>> On Jan 31, 2017, at 5:49 PM, Till Kamppeter <till.kamppeter at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ...
>> But to completely get rid of PPDs one would need to have CUPS support print queues with filters but without PPDs, where the data format list which the printer reports by IPP determines the destination format for the filter chain.
>
> And that will never happen.
>
> The purpose of IPP Everywhere is to eliminate vendor-specific stuff, including file formats and drivers/filters.  When we remove PPD support from CUPS (which again is not happening anytime soon), we will not replace PPDs with yet another driver file format - it will be the end of drivers.

I do not mean a new driver file format, what I mean is that CUPS knows 
the IPP record (what you see as output of this "ipptool -tv ipp://... 
get-printer-attributes.test" command) of each of its driverless print 
queues, at the latest having it polled from the printer when the client 
polls the print queue's capabilities or sends a job and with this knows 
the data formats which the printer understands. With this it can 
determine a filter chain as it could before with PPDs. The filters are 
naturally only those which come with CUPS and cups-filters, nothing 
printer-specific.

    Till