[cups] how to disable automatic ppd updating

[Till Kamppeter]

You can use a simple trick:

Edit the PPD file prefixing the NickName.

For example replace

*NickName:      "Generic PCL 5c Printer - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.11"

by

*NickName:      "CUSTOMISED: Generic PCL 5c Printer - CUPS+Gutenprint 
v5.2.11"

Then the PPD file updater is not able any more to identify to which 
Debian package this PPD belongs and so the PPD gets never updated.

What the prefix is does not matter, any prefix works.

I use the trick in cups-browsed, as there I download the PPD from a 
remote server to make the options available on the client, but I edit 
the PPD on the client to avoid duplicate filtering (on the client and on 
the server). These copies should naturally not get updated by the 
package updating processes, therefore I prefix the NickNames with 
"Remote printer: ".

Please report back whether it works for you.

    Till


On 10/03/2017 01:38 PM, Michael Pardee wrote:
> I don't know if this is a problem specific to the debian/ubuntu packaging,
> but when cups updates it updates my ppds, overwriting my custom changes.
> For example I have taken out the duplex options of a pcl 5c driver to
> create a queue with no duplex option, but when the cups package updates it
> regenerates the ppd and the duplex options are back in my ppds in
> /etc/cups/ppd.
> 
> My question is: how should I properly disable the automatic ppd updating?
> Is there something in the header of the ppd that it is keying off of that I
> can change/delete?  Do I need to back up and restore my custom ppds whenver
> I update cups?  I don't want to disable the postinst cups script altogether.