OpenPrinting Now Developing Upstream CUPS, Apple Bows Out

[callegar]

Very unclear to me who is going to write printer applications for printers that are 10 years old when drivers go away with CUPS 3.0. Not the printer manufacturers, I guess, since they have all the interest in you buying a new printer.

Is the plan that most raster printers and many PS printers will just stop working at the CUPS upgrade? Note that there are those printers in shared setups where you have no chance to see them substituted as windows folks will keep printing happily on them. Or is there a plan to build a generic "printer application" encapsulating what previously was the driver and PPD support existing in CUPS?

So far, it is quite easy to just download a PPD from the printer manufacturer and that will just work most of the time in a completely cross-platform way. Is it correct that "printer applications" are true applications, needing a different binary version on any platform (ARM, MIPS, etc.)?

Additionally, in many situations in which I see a printer supported both by PPD and IPP Everywhere, the former appears to provide a much finer control of the printer options (e.g. things like stapling, eco settings, color rendering, paper thickness) for the time being. Printer option dialogs for printers working with IPP Everywhere appear to be extremely basic, sufficient for little more than the occasional printing. This appears similar to how airscan/escl often support far less control than conventional SANE drivers. How is that going to be dealt with?

[Delgarde]

In that case, why do you have it running all the time? CUPS is able to start when you're about to use it via systemd socket activation
See: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CUPS#Socket_activation

It may _not_ be running all the time... browsing to localhost would start it via socket activation, so using the browser to check if it was running would ensure the answer was always "yes".

[oiaohm]

Very unclear to me who is going to write printer applications for printers that are 10 years old when drivers go away with CUPS 3.0. Not the printer manufacturers, I guess, since they have all the interest in you buying a new printer.

That a no on need to buy a new printer.

Or is there a plan to build a generic "printer application" encapsulating what previously was the driver and PPD support existing in CUPS?

https://www.cups.org/doc/man-ippeveprinter.html

Yes there is work to make a generic printer application for existing PPD. Of course this means the PPD stuff will no longer be in the CUPS servers.

Additionally, in many situations in which I see a printer supported both by PPD and IPP Everywhere, the former appears to provide a much finer control of the printer options (e.g. things like stapling, eco settings, color rendering, paper thickness) for the time being. Printer option dialogs for printers working with IPP Everywhere appear to be extremely basic, sufficient for little more than the occasional printing. This appears similar to how airscan/escl often support far less control than conventional SANE drivers. How is that going to be dealt with?

This something interesting. PPD end up exposing functionality that is not in face done by the device but in fact being done by CUPS and can be done by CUPS in a totally printer generic way. It kind of does not make sense that particular functionality is on one printer not on another when it done by cups generically just because the PPD file says not expose this functionality. Yes stapling, some of the eco options, large majority of the colour corrections are generic CUPS not printer functionality.

This is one of these problems that is bigger than PPD vs IPP its PPD vs PPD as well. Hopefully the process of CUPS 3.0 will sort this out so generic functionality that applies is simply always there no matter the printer you are using,

[soulsource]

Never considered that but in a way that is an applications bug. Maybe what we need is a very light weight app/damon that tells apps “ no printer installed “.

We have that. It's called CUPS.
(scnr - I'm at work right now, cannot look up how much resources CUPS actually needs while not actively printing, but given I've never even thought about its resource usage as an end user - and I am one of those people who disable X11 compositing to get a few MB of extra RAM - I doubt it's of much concern anywhere but in embedded, world.)

[reba]

It may _not_ be running all the time... browsing to localhost would start it via socket activation, so using the browser to check if it was running would ensure the answer was always "yes".

Usage looks okay to layman me...

user@host:~$ systemctl status cups*
● cups.socket - CUPS Scheduler
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/cups.socket; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Tue 2021-05-18 00:00:02 CEST; 11h ago
Triggers: ● cups.service
Listen: /run/cups/cups.sock (Stream)
CPU: 0
CGroup: /system.slice/cups.socket

● cups-browsed.service - Make remote CUPS printers available locally
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/cups-browsed.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Tue 2021-05-18 00:00:02 CEST; 11h ago
Main PID: 2214560 (cups-browsed)
Tasks: 3 (limit: 18985)
[B]Memory: 2.3M[/B]
[B]CPU: 129ms[/B]
CGroup: /system.slice/cups-browsed.service
└─2214560 /usr/sbin/cups-browsed

● cups.path - CUPS Scheduler
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/cups.path; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Tue 2021-05-18 00:00:02 CEST; 11h ago
Triggers: ● cups.service

● cups.service - CUPS Scheduler
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/cups.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Tue 2021-05-18 00:00:02 CEST; 11h ago
TriggeredBy: ● cups.path
● cups.socket
Docs: man:cupsd(8)
Main PID: 2214553 (cupsd)
Status: "Scheduler is running..."
Tasks: 2 (limit: 18985)
[B]Memory: 4.7M
CPU: 27ms[/B]
CGroup: /system.slice/cups.service
├─2214553 /usr/sbin/cupsd -l
└─2214555 /usr/lib/cups/notifier/dbus dbus://

user@host:~$ uptime
11:06:41 [B]up 5 days, 27 min[/B], 1 user, load average: 0,50, 0,37, 0,45

Are the services restarted once a day? Watch the "Active:" line.

[Azrael5]

I hope that PAPPL will improve the Printer LAN ability to make printer detected.

[M@GOid]

Apple has decided not to pursue feature development further on CUPS and upstream feature development has been effectively transferred to the OpenPrinting project.

So, Apple handled the project to the OpenPrinting folks?

See how easy it is to do the right thing, Apache Foundation?

[oiaohm]

So, Apple handled the project to the OpenPrinting folks?

See how easy it is to do the right thing, Apache Foundation?

The Linux Foundation is who is behind the Open Printing not Apache Foundation.

https://openprinting.github.io/about-us/

Yes open printing been part of The Linux Foundation since it formation because it was already part of one of the two foundations that merged to form "The Linux Foundation" software development side in 2007.

[furtadopires]

The Linux Foundation is who is behind the Open Printing not Apache Foundation.

https://openprinting.github.io/about-us/

Yes open printing been part of The Linux Foundation since it formation because it was already part of one of the two foundations that merged to form "The Linux Foundation" software development side in 2007.

I think he meant that Apple did the "right thing" at handle CUPS to the Open Printing Foundation, but Apache doesn't do the same with Open Office.

[dekernel]

We have that. It's called CUPS.
(scnr - I'm at work right now, cannot look up how much resources CUPS actually needs while not actively printing, but given I've never even thought about its resource usage as an end user - and I am one of those people who disable X11 compositing to get a few MB of extra RAM - I doubt it's of much concern anywhere but in embedded, world.)

I just printed something less than 5 minutes ago, and cupsd is showing 1.9Mib of memory usage on my workstation.