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

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <alpine.SOC.2.20.1906101719430.9162 at dogbert.cc.ndsu.NoDak.edu>,
Tim Mooney <Tim.Mooney at ndsu.edu> wrote:

>rfg wrote:
>> Firstly, here is the correct/working one for my Brother MFC-7860DW that
>> I stole from my Ubuntu system and that I am now using, mostly successfully,
>> over on my FreeBSD system:
>>
>>    https://pastebin.com/raw/Q3V8ZRRx
>
>Great!  Perhaps you should find out which package that's part of on
>Ubuntu, and see if there's a corresponding package for FreeBSD?  I'll give
>you a hint: it's probably not going to be CUPS (but I could, of course,
>be wrong).

Will do.

>>  And yet the
>> built-in set of .ppd files in CUPS 2.2.10 (which is the latest official
>> CUPS port available for FreeBSD)
>...
>> only includes about 20-30 .ppd files for
>> a small subset of all Brother printer models... NOT including the specific
>> .ppd file that I got from my Ubuntu system for my MFC-7860DW.

I misspoke and the number is actually far higher than 20-30... perhaps 90
or 100.  And I think that perhaps I have figured out where -those- "included"
Brother .ppd files may be coming from.

It appears to me likely that those are all coming in from the gutenprint
project.  I will be checking on that to verify.  But assuming so, then
my real beef is with those folks, and I should just ask them nicely to
start picking up more of the already-GPLd .ppd files for more Brother
printers... which may eventually cause those to appear, right outta the
box, as available "built in" options for/with CUPS.

>Before you throw any more shade on CUPS, perhaps you should read
>

> 	https://www.cups.org/blog/2018-06-06-demystifying-cups-development.html

Swell.  I just read it, and I am now even more mystified than I was before!

I get that ipp is/was intended to supplant and make impotent and obsolete
all of this .ppd file silliness, but how exactly does it do that?  Are all
of the capabilities & features of each ipp-capable printer now fetchable
from the printer itself via TCP/HTTP ?  Is that the basic idea?  If so,
it sounds swell to me!  Now, if I could only get my printer and CUPS 2.x
to play ipp together, I think I could die a happy man.

Alas, I just now tried to do that exact thing on on my freshly installed
Ubuntu 18.04 system and my attempt crashed and burned for no apparently
good reason. I went through the web interface (localhost:631) added a
fresh new ipp printer (i.e. my Brother MFC-7860DW) which I verifed, both
by looking at the detailed official spec and by using telnet *is* in fact
responding to TCP connects to port 631 (ipp).  The new printer that I
created vai CUPS was specified via this URI:

    ipp:/192.168.1.57/ipp/print

(Note:  I have my printer set to the static IP 192.168.1.57.)

Is that a proper sort of ipp URI or not?  I hope so, but since I've never
seen one before today I can't be at all sure.

Anyway, when I was adding this new (logical) ipp printer in CUPS, I do seem
to recall that the CUPS Add Printer web interface -still- asked me for a
.ppd file anyway... and I did supply the known-working one that I now have.
(Wasn't the idea that ipp-capable printers make .ppd files unnecessary?)

Nontheless, when I went to print via the ipp printer that I had just added to
CUPS, nothing printed and I got some sort of a totally opaque and mysterious
error messge showing up in the Print Jobs listing.  Something real helpful
like "The configuration is wrong" or something like that.  Swell.

>You might also want to spend some time looking at what packages on your
>Ubuntu system actually provide the PPDs.

I will be doing so, *however* the document you just refered me to seems to
says that .ppd files are soooooooo last century, and that in the the wonderful
modern utopia we now live in, we don't need those silly things anymore,
because we all have ipp capable printers now.  Yes?  No?

Well, I have an ipp-capable printer, but CUPS doesn't seem to like playing
ipp with it.  (The good old lpd:// protocol seems to work just fine with
my MFC-7860DW however.  I tried it with lpd://192.168.1.57/queue and that
works just fine. It's terrible slow, and Firefox is still messing up some
of the conversion from HTML to PDF, but other than that, it works and prints
nice clear fonts.  I'm guessing than the slowness may be coming from some
entirely inappropriate rasterization or something... yet another non-
feature that I have to debug somehow.)


Regards,
rfg