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

[Martin Pitt]

Hello,

sacrificial-spam-address at horizon.com [2012-02-01 10:15 -0500]:
> The split off of a separate cups-filters package omits the "texttops"
> command which is called for in /etc/cups/mime.convs.

Well, it actually was deliberately dropped, as cups has used an
internal PDF workflow for a long time already.

> # grep texttops /etc/cups/mine.convs
> application/x-cshell	application/postscript	33	texttops

This is a local configuration file, not shipped by cups. So this does
not break the package for everybody, but nevertheless is a rather
important upgrade issue. But I don't want to argue about the severity
of the report, we need to fix it one way or the other anyway.

There could be a debconf warning, but I think it would be better to
reintroduce a simple texttops shell wrapper which more or less does
"texttopdf | pdftops". Till wanted to look into this.

> 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.

Amen.. :/

> 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.

I think it does when you do "cupsctl --debug-logging".

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)