[Pkg-samba-maint] RFC: cups as "default" printing system for lenny?

[Bernd Zeimetz]

Russ Allbery wrote:

> Also, do we really need *any* printing system as priority: standard?  It's
> not clear to me that printing is still really part of a standard Unix
> installation, even for desktop users (and it definitely isn't for
> servers).
> 


I'd guess most Desktop installations have a printing system installed,
just because you need it if you want to print. Cups works very well for
that these days as it is able to detect the printers which are shared by
other cups installations in the network. If you're not 'living' in a
network with an administrated cups server, adding/configuring printers
is - for example - possible from the KDE Control Center. You can still
configure cups on http://localhost:631 - but as far as I can tell
there's no need to use the webinterface anymore.

For servers a printing system doesn't make sense, especially if it does
more than listening on a local port. As far as I know the default
setting of cups is to broadcast, looking for other printers in all
networks. I'd definitely want to avoid that on a server.

Not sure if anybody is still using the old BSD printing stuff - at least
I can't see any reason why it should have a higher priority than optional.


Cheers,

Bernd

-- 
Bernd Zeimetz
<bernd at bzed.de>                         <http://bzed.de/>