[Pkg-cups-devel] Bug#501719: Bug#501719: cups-pdf: doesn't play well with NetWare shares

Luca Capello luca at pca.it
Mon Oct 27 17:56:45 UTC 2008


tags 501719 + patch
thanks

Hi Martin!

On Mon, 20 Oct 2008 08:33:20 +0200, Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 12:37 AM, Luca Capello <luca at pca.it> wrote:
>> I think we've three bugs here:
>>
>> 1) a documentation one about the features of the filesystem for the
>>   output directory (this is the original bug)
>
> We cannot anticipate the quirks for every imaginable case of network
> filesystem, sorry.

I didn't ask to anticipate anything, please re-read what I wrote and
also what upstream said in [1], quoting him, second paragraph:

  I disagree that this is a bug - it behaves exactly as designed.
  Nevertheless I admit that I should make a clearer statement in the
  documentation that I assume a filesystem for the output that features
  all basic properties of UNIX-filesystems.

As I cannot find any $VCS repository for upstream, here a patch against
the Debian package based on upstream words, feel free to include it:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
--- cups-pdf-2.4.8/README.~1~	2008-06-22 13:41:29.000000000 +0200
+++ cups-pdf-2.4.8/README	2008-10-27 18:35:03.000000000 +0100
@@ -45,6 +45,13 @@
         and set the file permissions of the backend to 0700 (root only).
    *make sure if any of CUPS-PDF's working directories (e.g. output) is a 
     NFS mounted volume it is mounted without root_squash!
+   *make sure that the filesystem for any of CUPS-PDF's working directories
+    (e.g. output) features all basic properties of UNIX-filesystems,
+    especially chown(1) and chmod(1).  This means that if you want to use a
+    NetWare share as CUPS-PDF's output directory, the NetWare share should be
+    mount with the ncpfs' options uid and gid set to the user that want to
+    print her/his PDFs there.  This was extensively discussed in the Debian
+    bug #501719 (http://bugs.debian.org/501719).
    *CUPS-PDF is known to fail if the gs (GhostScript) binary on a system is 
     compressed by upx (Ultimate Packer for eXecutables).
    *if you are using SELinux make sure it does not interfere with CUPS-PDF
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

>> 2) CUPS-PDF not catching all the Ghostscript errors [2]
>
> Nor should it. A Ghostscript error doesn't imply failure to print. It
> could be e.g. failure to embed certain fonts, etc.

A failure to embed certain fonts *is* an error, since the resulting PDF
is not what I was expecting.  However, frankly speaking, I already
expressed my opinions, thus I'll stop to reiterate them.

>> 3) CUPD-PDF not setting the ownership for the output directory when the
>>   latter already exists
>
> It's not quite that. The AnonUser is an exception case. One thing I
> notice in this thread is that you assume that AnonUser means UID
> 65534. It doesn't. It's not anonymous in the sense of UNIX user
> nobody. Rather, it's in the sense of Samba guest user.

Can you please stay on topic?  There are no references to the AnonUser
in the part of my post you quoted.  And FWIW, even on the other bug I
filed about the AnonUser [2], I didn't assume anything about which UID
gets assigned to AnonUser.

> When used with a normal system user it creates the directory and sets
> ownership, if it's absent.

And indeed my remark was about the particular situation when the output
directory already exists: if, even in this case, CUPS-PDF would set
ownership, then I'd have discovered this bug before [3].

Thx, bye,
Gismo / Luca

Footnotes: 
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=501719#30
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=502555
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=501719#15
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