[cups] documentation and no response

[Michael Sweet]

Kalle,

FYI, the people who answer questions on this mailing list are volunteering their time (for example, I don't get paid to respond to questions on this mailing list...), so questions are answered (or not) as time or knowledge permits.  Particularly questions posted right before a weekend will likely see a delayed response.

Also FYI, Monday, October 9th was a holiday in both the US and Canada, so some of us volunteers would have been enjoying  our extra day off and then "paying" for it the next day playing catch-up with our email.

In short, we're happy to answer questions here but please be patient and don't expect an instant response.

That said, here is my holiday-delayed response to your questions...


> On Oct 10, 2017, at 1:33 PM, kalle <kalle at projektwerkstatt.de> wrote:
> 
> hello,
> on the 6th of oct. I sent this mail through this mailing list, but no
> one responded:
> 
> "The administration part of Printers is missing in the document
> "Command-Line Printing and Options". Nothing written about `lpadmin' or
> so. Is this purpose?

Yes.  The lpadmin command is documented by the lpadmin man page. (every CUPS command has a corresponding man page...)


> Searching for command-line documentation for
> printer management I found the former document "CUPS Software
> Administrators Manual" (CUPS-SAM), where this was noted.
> I already asked in bug #5108, why SAM is not part of the official
> documentation anymore, but got insufficient answer.

Perhaps I could have been clearer with a link to the help files on CUPS.org:

    https://www.cups.org/documentation.html
    https://www.cups.org/doc/man-lpadmin.html

Many people use the CUPS web interface, which on your local machine would be available at the following URL:

    http://localhost:631


> Why is all this so?

The monolithic SAM (and SUM) were dropped in CUPS 1.2 in favor of smaller help pages for specific topics with better man pages for the commands themselves.  This was partly because it is hard to keep such large documents current - CUPS 1.2 made significant changes that would have required a large rewrite of each document.  We also had several complaints/bugs concerning the man pages and documentation in general such as the difficulty locating a specific topic in the monolithic manuals.


> Another question: does the GPL also apply to the CUPS-documentation?

Yes, it is part of the CUPS source code and covered by the GPL (version 2).


_________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer