[Pkg-cups-devel] Bug#333746: cupsys: CUPSYS needs an interface for easy reinstall of updated PPDs

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

Package: cupsys
Version: 1.1.23-12
Severity: important

CUPS lacks a proper interface for automated update of PPDs.  This causes
updates in hpijs that require up-to-date hplip-ppds/foomatic-filters-ppds
PPDs to silently break printing on people's systems, often in very annoying
ways.

Ideally, CUPS should reload any PPDs that have been modified on disk, or
at the very least allow us to command it to do so programatically.

The current way to unbreak printing due to an outdated PPD requires manual
intervention from the printing administrator, which needs to "Modify" the
printer in a CUPS administrative interface to force a PPD reload.  This is
not only very sub-par and user unfriendly, it is also quite often very
annoying (CUPS does *NOT* pre-fill the forms with all the current settings,
which is a bug on its own).

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (990, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.13.4-debian1+libata+bluesmoke+imq+lm85
Locale: LANG=pt_BR.ISO-8859-1, LC_CTYPE=pt_BR.ISO-8859-1 (charmap=ISO-8859-1)

Versions of packages cupsys depends on:
ii  adduser             3.67.2               Add and remove users and groups
ii  debconf [debconf-2. 1.4.58               Debian configuration management sy
ii  gs-esp              8+8.15rc4.dfsg.1-2.1 The Ghostscript PostScript interpr
ii  libc6               2.3.5-6              GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libcupsimage2       1.1.23-12            Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - 
ii  libcupsys2          1.1.23-12            Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - 
ii  libgnutls12         1.2.6-1              the GNU TLS library - runtime libr
ii  libpam0g            0.79-3               Pluggable Authentication Modules l
ii  libpaper1           1.1.14-3             Library for handling paper charact
ii  libslp1             1.2.1-3              OpenSLP libraries
ii  patch               2.5.9-2              Apply a diff file to an original
ii  perl-modules        5.8.7-5              Core Perl modules
ii  procps              1:3.2.5-1            /proc file system utilities
ii  xpdf-utils          3.01-2               Portable Document Format (PDF) sui
ii  zlib1g              1:1.2.3-4            compression library - runtime

Versions of packages cupsys recommends:
ii  cupsys-client           1.1.23-12        Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - 
ii  foomatic-filters        3.0.2-20050720-1 linuxprinting.org printer support 
ii  smbclient               3.0.14a-6        a LanManager-like simple client fo

-- debconf information excluded

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh