Brett Parker iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk
On 22 Mar 21:03, Ted Harding wrote:
In my experience, CUPS can be very tricky to get working, especially for "raw" files (i.e. sent to the printer as-is). The old LP system was much more straightforward.
The old system was lpr, not lp... lp is the binary provided by cups that acts almost like lpr.
I'm pretty sure lp was for line printing, lpr was Line Printer Remote.
[...]
I would *never* recommend reinventing the (several) existing wheels for printing, there's too many things that can (and will) go wrong, and then you're stuck with no support as no one is going to want to trawl through your hacky print spooler code and try to work out what the heck you've got completely totally wrong.
How many people even need a spooler? Most of the time, it would be enough to have a filter that throws it through gs with the right options (which will handle most PDFs these days) and sends the output to /dev/lp0 or whatever. Simple, stupid and usually works, but is much easier to debug when it doesn't.
cups and even lprng are both overkill for nearly everyone, really. I wouldn't be surprised if the time spent troubleshooting their artificially-intelligent choices almost always outweighs the time saved not setting the options manually.
But if you need to print to a variety of printers around various networks with autodiscovery and stuff like that, CUPS is probably a fine choice. It has its place.
Regards,