Re: [Printing-architecture] Automatic printer setup with Printer Applications

[Till Kamppeter <till.kamppeter@gmail.com>]

On 25/02/2021 09:52, Zdenek Dohnal wrote:
> Sounds reasonable, except for crying in beer! That's never reasonable
> around here :D
> 
> So udev-configure-printer would:
> 
> 1) check if there is a USB device - if it is IPP-over-USB and isn't in
> allow list (probably there will be devices which will present themselves
> as IPP-over-USB, but it will be broken, so they want to fall back to
> printer application...), break out
> 
> 2) find a printer application which supports the device
> 
> 3) if it is not installed, install it - this will need to be updated -
> currently PackageKit is used in scp lib, but PackageKit is going away in
> the future [1] - I heard there is some work in DNF regarding PackageKit
> functionality, but I'm not sure how far they are. Not mentioning it is a
> distro specific package manager, not sure if other distros have already
> some alternative to PackageKit.
>

Here we should not only consider distro-specific RPM and DEB packages 
but also distro-independent packaging, like Snap, as Printer 
Applications should also serve for hardware manufacturers to easily 
create distro-independent driver packages, one for all.

Central repositories, like the Snap Store would need some 
hardware-signature-based search, see

https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/hardware-associated-snaps-snap-store-search-by-hardware-signature/

> 4) auto-add the device to a printer application - scp lib for adding
> print queues is now for CUPS only and written in Python, so it will need
> to be rewritten in C/Go using PAPPL.
> 

Zdenek, could you update your GSoC project idea if needed?

https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/gsoc/google-summer-code-2021-openprinting-projects#turn_the_scp-dbus-service_methods_-_getbestdrivers_and_missingexecutables_-_of_system-config-printer_into_c

    Till