[cups] Newbie seeks help / FreeBSD 12.0 / Brother MFC-7860DW

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <62802.1559943670 at segfault.tristatelogic.com>, I wrote:

>{... a bunch of gibberish...}

Well, I spent a bit more time researching what the bleep was actually
happening here, and I am already a lot more well educated about CUPS
than I was even just 20 minutes ago.

Apparently, my first mistake was that when I went to the web interface
for CUPS (http://localhost:631/admin/) I had mistakenly clicked on
"Find New Printers", assuming, incorrectly, that this would be the first
step in enabling my printer.  Needless to say that was 100% wrong.
What I really needed to do was to just click on "Add Printer". Once
I did that, my Brother MFC-7860DW came up as an option, and I proceeded
to try to finish "adding" it.

This, it turns out, was no so easy.  There was a list of known Brother
printer models in a drop-down menu.  Mine, of course, was not among them.
But that same page seems/seemed to allow me to add my MFC-7860DW *if* I could
somehow supply an appropriate .ppd file.  I went googling, and found one
here:

https://github.com/illwieckz/debian_copyist_brother/blob/master/material/abstract/printers/generated_content/ppd/MFC7860DW.ppd

I have almost no understanding of the material in this file, except for
the self-explanitory parts.  Anyway, I tried to use that MFC7860DW.ppd file,
which I had saved a copy of to my local /tmp/ directory, as the .ppf file
in order to complete the "add" of my printer.

This failed, of course, for reasons that are entierly beyond my understanding.
The failure message(s) is/are more than a little cryptic:

    Unable to open PPD file:
        Missing asterisk in column 1

Note that the file /tmp/MFC7860DW.ppd is world readable (0644) on my system,
so this is evidently not a permissions problem.

Where can I get a .ppd file for an MFC-7860DW that cupsd will actually
like, rather than reject?