Printer Autodetection

[Danny Kukawka]

On Sunday 13 November 2005 23:09, John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
[...]
> It might be nice to merge via
> FDI files but the database is huge so I don't know what the performance
> would be like. 

Brendan told me at #hal there are more than 1500 printer in the foomatic 
database. I think it would slow down the matching for printer for this 
fdi-file, but not complete sure about.

> Also the foomatics database doesn't match the IEEE 
> strings exactly but I guess that heuristic could be added to the program
> that converts it to FDI files.  As for parallel printers I think they
> are mostly a lost cause since you need a bi directional parallel cable
> and you need to probe.  I would think a small program that has a button,
> probe for new hardware or something like that would be useful there but
> otherwise it isn't something that can be auto-detected when the printer
> is plugged in.

I think the best solution would be as for libgphoto2 to integrate this in the 
foomatic package (at least also because of dependencies to foomatic package) 
and add a fdi-file to callout this as a extra programm/process to read 
directly from the database. This could be maybe faster than reading from 
fdi-file and match then the device. In this case you could also do any kind 
of probing in this programm/process and merge the properties back to HAL.

Cheers,

Danny