HAL and Cups

[Joe Shaw]

Hi,

On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 12:16 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> The backend stuff (foomatic, cups et all) seem to work well

Really the situation here is pretty dire too.  There isn't any
synchronization between CUPS and Foomatic in terms of what drivers to
use, default settings to apply, etc.  If you happen to get the right
driver for your printer, it's because the high-level tools (YaST on
SUSE, for example) use some surprisingly effective yet still error prone
heuristics to try to match them up.  The foomatic database has over 1000
printers listed, but USB ids for fewer than two dozen.

The HAL backend for CUPS that I wrote about 18 months ago helps the
situation some in terms of presenting a single view of printers to
client applications, but users still have to tell the computer what
model their printer is to get drivers, and that sucks.

Joe