AutomaticPrinterConfiguration

Revision 1 as of 2005-10-28 20:21:13

Clear message

Summary

We want to improve the hotplug support for printers (more) automatic and at the same time improve driver support.

Rationale

In Breezy, nothing happens if a user plugs in a USB printer. In order to make its setup easier, the user should automatically get an offer to configure it, and get guided through the installation.

Use cases

Scope

Design

Implementation

  • Add dbus support to cupsys. RedHat already did the cupsys/hal/dbus integration. The SRPMS we need to look at are cups (for patches), hal-cups-utils (for unprivileged configuration changes) and desktop-printing (for eggcups notification, which would replace gnome-cups-manager's nicons). John (J5) Palmieri and Colin Walters are the dudes to talk to about collaborating on this stuff. Easy Software aren't that interested in integrating this with CUPS (yet).

  • Don't require cupsys to be restarted when a new printer is plugged in. (This seems to be solved in 1.2beta).
  • Automatically start gnome-cups-add if the logged in user has lpadmin and the printer is not configured yet. gnome-volume-manager already has support for it, but Breezy's cupsys is not prepared for hal/dbus support.

  • gnome-cups-add shoud work directly with foomatic printer drivers database (see http://www.linuxprinting.org/foomatic.html). Other printer configuration utils, like Foomatic-GUI can use foomatic printer drivers database directly. You steal some code from such projects, look at http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/foomatic-gui/ and http://blog.lordsutch.com/?topic=13 . If foomatic support would be added to gnome-cups-manager, then users don't need to generate .ppd files manually or through www.linuxprinting.org web interface and adding new printer will be more user-friendly. Look at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171047 for more info about this bug

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

BoF agenda and discussion