[Printing-architecture] Forth beta of the second generation of the Common Print Dialog Backends released!

[Printing-architecture] Forth beta of the second generation of the Common Print Dialog Backends released!

[Till Kamppeter]

Hi,

We are now releasing the forth beta of the second generation of the 
Common Print Dialog Backends (CPDB).

Main addition are build test scripts (make check) for all the three 
components, as they are not only useful for general QA but especially 
required for inclusion of the CPDB packages into Ubuntu Main. Main is 
the core part of Ubuntu, which gets full support from Canonical.

To facilitate creation of test scripts for the backends, for creating 
test scripts which test packages installed into a system (like 
autopkgtests of Debian and Ubuntu), and also for general development and 
debugging use, the demo programs of cpdb-libs (former demo/ 
sub-directory) got promoted to be development tools. Not only their 
directory got renamed (to tools/) but also the programs get built 
together with the libraries by make and get installed by make install. 
And they got also renamed to nicely live in a system: cpdb-text-frontend 
and cpdb-pickle-print.

Another feature to ease writing test scripts for backend packages is 
that now the frontend library does not only look for backend metadata in 
a hard-wired system directory (/usr/share/print-backends/) but one can 
provide an alternative location via the CPDB_BACKEND_INFO_DIR 
environment variable. So a build test of a freshly compiled and not yet 
installed backend is no problem any more.

And while developing test scripts one usually tests the software itself 
a lot. And this revealed some bugs, including crashers, which got also 
fixed with this release.

The components we are currently maintaining got all updated and released 
as version 2.0b4.

Here we go:

https://openprinting.github.io/Common-Print-Dialog-Backends-Second-Generation-Forth-Beta-Release/

There are also GitHub discussions set up for each release now.

    Till

[Printing-architecture] Forth beta of the second generation of the Common Print Dialog Backends released!

[Till Kamppeter]

Hi,

We are now releasing the fifth beta of the second generation of the 
Common Print Dialog Backends (CPDB).

Main change is the removal of the backend info files, in a standard 
installation in the /usr/share/print-backends/ directory. They are not 
actually needed, all containing the D-Bus object path /, which we can 
simply hard-code, and we also cannot use the files to determine which 
backends are there, as both the frontend and the backends can be 
provided in a sandboxed package, like a Snap or an OCI container 
(podman, Docker, …), and so cannot read each other’s file systems.

So frontends communicate with backends purely by D-Bus, not any more by 
the file system.

In addition, we have fixed several bugs, especially security 
vulnerability CVE-2023-34095, a buffer overflow due to unlimited 
scanning of input strings by scanf() and fscanf() calls, some crashers, 
and a bug breaking make install.

The components we are currently maintaining got all updated and released 
as version 2.0b5.

Here we go:

https://openprinting.github.io/Common-Print-Dialog-Backends-Second-Generation-Fifth-Beta-Release/

There are also GitHub discussions set up for each release now.

    Till