[Pkg-cups-devel] Bug#658258: Cups 1.5.0-16 breaks plain text printing

[sacrificial-spam-address at horizon.com]

Package: cups
Version: 1.5.0-16
Severity: grave

[521]$ echo "Hello, world" | lpr
lpr: Unsupported document-format "text/plain".

The split off of a separate cups-filters package omits the "texttops"
command which is called for in /etc/cups/mime.convs.

# dpkg-deb -c cups-filters_1.0~b1-3_i386.deb | grep filter/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2012-01-30 01:41 ./usr/lib/cups/filter/
-rwxr-xr-x root/root     34076 2012-01-30 01:41 ./usr/lib/cups/filter/rastertoescpx
-rwxr-xr-x root/root     55960 2012-01-30 01:41 ./usr/lib/cups/filter/imagetoraster
-rwxr-xr-x root/root    149088 2012-01-30 01:41 ./usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftoopvp
-rwxr-xr-x root/root      9500 2012-01-30 01:41 ./usr/lib/cups/filter/commandtoescpx
-rwxr-xr-x root/root     89192 2012-01-30 01:41 ./usr/lib/cups/filter/texttopdf
-rwxr-xr-x root/root      6481 2012-01-30 01:41 ./usr/lib/cups/filter/pstopdf
-rwxr-xr-x root/root    155740 2012-01-30 01:41 ./usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftopdf
-rwxr-xr-x root/root     21904 2012-01-30 01:41 ./usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftoijs
-rwxr-xr-x root/root     17752 2012-01-30 01:41 ./usr/lib/cups/filter/bannertopdf
-rwxr-xr-x root/root     34076 2012-01-30 01:41 ./usr/lib/cups/filter/rastertopclx
-rwxr-xr-x root/root      5404 2012-01-30 01:41 ./usr/lib/cups/filter/commandtopclx
-rwxr-xr-x root/root     34196 2012-01-30 01:41 ./usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftoraster
-rwxr-xr-x root/root      3561 2012-01-30 01:21 ./usr/lib/cups/filter/textonly
-rwxr-xr-x root/root     34120 2012-01-30 01:41 ./usr/lib/cups/filter/imagetopdf
-rwxr-xr-x root/root     21968 2012-01-30 01:41 ./usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftops
# grep texttops /etc/cups/mine.convs
application/x-cshell	application/postscript	33	texttops
application/x-csource	application/postscript	33	texttops
application/x-perl	application/postscript	33	texttops
application/x-shell	application/postscript	33	texttops
text/plain		application/postscript	33	texttops
text/html		application/postscript	33	texttops

This is Extremely Not Okay, thus the high severity level.
grave: "makes the package in question unusable or mostly so"


<rant>
Have I also mentioned that cups error reporting (or, more specifically,
the catastrophic lack of it) is a festering reeking maggot-ridden
mountain of suppurating shit?

You'd think it would be easy enough to log an error message like
"execve: /usr/lib/cups/filter/texttops: No such file or directory" to
bestow upon the humble sysadmin a clue as to *why* the document format
is not supported.  But no, all I get is:

D [01/Feb/2012:14:35:11 +0000] Send-Document ipp://localhost:631/printers/lablp
D [01/Feb/2012:14:35:11 +0000] cupsdIsAuthorized: requesting-user-name="$USER"
D [01/Feb/2012:14:35:11 +0000] [Job 138052] Auto-typing file...
D [01/Feb/2012:14:35:11 +0000] [Job 138052] Request file type is text/plain.
D [01/Feb/2012:14:35:11 +0000] Send-Document client-error-document-format-not-supported: Unsupported document-format "text/plain".
E [01/Feb/2012:14:35:11 +0000] Returning IPP client-error-document-format-not-supported for Send-Document (ipp://localhost:631/printers/lablp) from localhost
D [01/Feb/2012:14:35:11 +0000] cupsdSetBusyState: newbusy="Dirty files", busy="Active clients and dirty files"
D [01/Feb/2012:14:35:11 +0000] cupsdReadClient: 17 WAITING Closing on EOF
D [01/Feb/2012:14:35:11 +0000] cupsdCloseClient: 17
D [01/Feb/2012:14:35:11 +0000] cupsdSetBusyState: newbusy="Dirty files", busy="Dirty files"

... leaving me to grovel though the configuration files and figure out
not just which step of cups' byzantine internal processes is not working,
but what those steps are in the first place!

There should be a log message somewhere explaining the sequence of filters
that cups chooses to apply, and detailed error output if any of them fail.

Maybe I could just go back to lprng + magicfilter...
</rant>