[cups] documentation and no response

Sun Oct 15 01:50:01 PDT 2017

hello>> "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...)

In the documentation "https://www.cups.org/documentation.html" I
assume beginners start with the section "Getting Started" and not with
the part "Man Pages", where the sections have strange names which don't
tell you what you need. So IMO it would make sense to introduce the
command `lpadmin' to the article "Command-Line Printing and Options",
while for full documentation refering to the man-page.
I think that the document "Command-Line Printing and Options" has an
introductory quality, not being a full documentation. How to install
printers should be referred to somewhere there, since you cannot print
without administration.

>> 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.

Command-Line administrative tasks where part of SAM. Since they are now
not part of a comparable documentation, it is a quality loss.

>> 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).

What confuses me is that, when I visit the site
`www.cups.org/documentation.html', the only reference, which prompts to
my eyes is the line at the bottom, telling

>From this alone I would deduce that the at least the documentation is
proprietary, if not the whole software.

kalle