Changes coming for CUPS 1.6

Tim Waugh twaugh at redhat.com
Wed Jan 18 16:43:33 UTC 2012


Hi,

Although the latest version of CUPS is 1.5.0, development is continuing
apace on 1.6.  There are some important changes coming in 1.6 which
deserve to be pointed out.

Some time ago CUPS became an Apple project, and now some of the features
that are not relevant to Mac OS are being orphaned.  Where they are of
use for the Linux environment, those orphaned features will continue to
be maintained at OpenPrinting (http://www.openprinting.org/) as a
separate project.

CUPS Browsing
-------------

One of the notable things that will be disappearing is CUPS Browsing.
This is currently the primary mechanism for CUPS-to-CUPS printer queue
discovery on Linux.  It works by having each CUPS server periodically
broadcast UDP packets on port 631 announcing its available queues.

This method of discovery is being dropped in favour of DNS-SD.  Support
for this has been upstream in CUPS for some time -- it's what CUPS uses
on Mac OS X -- but is not functional with Avahi. (For Fedora, I have
added patches to support Avahi.)

This means that once CUPS drops support for CUPS Browsing, automatic
CUPS queue discovery *will require Avahi* to be running on both the
server (i.e. the system hosting the CUPS queue) and the clients (i.e.
the systems wanting to print to it).

Some Filters Moving To New Home
-------------------------------

Apple is removing some filters from CUPS as they are not needed for Mac
OS X.  These filters will be maintained in a new "cups-filters" project
at OpenPrinting.

As part of this move, Till Kamppeter will be merging the existing PDF
Workflow filters¹ into that effort.

The main purpose of this email was to raise awareness of the CUPS
Browsing/Avahi issue.

Till Kamppeter's email about the CUPS 1.6 changes on the
printing-architecture list:
http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/printing-architecture/2012/002412.html

Tim.
*/

¹ http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting/pdf_as_standard_print_job_format

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