PWG+OpenPrinting meetup 2023

[Zdenek Dohnal]

Hi all,

I've joined annual PWG+OpenPrinting virtual meetup where the news and 
statuses from the current printing development are discussed.

The main points are:

- cups-filters 2.0 betas and release candidates are released and present 
in Fedora 38

- since new cups-filters are in Fedora 38, nothing stands in the way of 
packaging pappl-retrofit and printer applications based on it into 
Fedora as RPMs - any volunteers are welcome!

- CUPS 2.4.x, CUPS 2.5 and CUPS 3.0 are delayed:

- 2.4.x - there are several regressions I haven't able to tackle 
yet, but I hope there is a new version in a month

- 2.5 - OAuth support took lot of time to implement

- 3.0 - libcups (its version 3.0) has a beta which developers which 
uses libcups 2.0 can compile and link their applications and see what 
changed between major release

- GTK (its version 4) has merged support for Common Print Dialog 
Backends - universal print dialog, which can work not only with cups, 
but with other possible backends (like google cloud print)

- WIP on Printer Setup Tool for GNOME Control Center - full support for 
driverless printers and printers via printer applications

The full report is attached.

Zdenek

[Douglas Kosovic]

Hi Zdenek,

Regarding packaging pappl-retrofit and printer applications, looking at the pappl-retrofit based snaps from Till Kamppeter, I suspect the existing Fedora pappl package might need to be modified.

For example, extract from ps-printer-app's snapcraft.yaml file which modifies pappl's default build settings:

https://github.com/OpenPrinting/ps-printer-app/blob/master/snap/snapcraft.ya...

pappl:
...
    override-build: |
      set -eux
      # Raise the supported number of vendor-specific options/attributes in
      # PAPPL to 256, as the original 32 can be too small for some busy PPD
      # files
      perl -p -i -e 's/(define\s+PAPPL_MAX_VENDOR\s+)32/\1 256/' pappl/printer.h
      # De-activate log-rotating. It does not work with the forked processes
      # of the filters
      perl -p -i -e 's/(system->logmaxsize\s+=).*/\1 0;/' pappl/system.c
      # As we do not use PAPPL's own backends but the CUPS backends using the
      # "cups" device scheme of pappl-retrofit, we let the manual "Network
      # Printer" device on the "Add Printer" page of the web interface use a
      # "cups:socket://..." URI instead of simply "socket://..."
      perl -p -i -e 's/(httpAssembleURI(.*?)"socket"(.*?))/\1"cups:socket"\2/' pappl/system-webif.c
      # PAPPL's build system does not insert the LDFLAGS when linking.
      # Patching Makedefs.in to fix this
      perl -p -i -e 's/^(\s*DSOFLAGS\s*=\s*\S*\s+)/\1$(LDFLAGS) /' Makedefs.in

Cheers,
Doug

-----Original Message-----
From: Zdenek Dohnal  
Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2023 4:26 AM
To: Development discussions related to Fedora 
Subject: PWG+OpenPrinting meetup 2023

Hi all,

I've joined annual PWG+OpenPrinting virtual meetup where the news and statuses from the current printing development are discussed.

The main points are:

- cups-filters 2.0 betas and release candidates are released and present in Fedora 38

- since new cups-filters are in Fedora 38, nothing stands in the way of packaging pappl-retrofit and printer applications based on it into Fedora as RPMs - any volunteers are welcome!

- CUPS 2.4.x, CUPS 2.5 and CUPS 3.0 are delayed:

- 2.4.x - there are several regressions I haven't able to tackle yet, but I hope there is a new version in a month

- 2.5 - OAuth support took lot of time to implement

- 3.0 - libcups (its version 3.0) has a beta which developers which uses libcups 2.0 can compile and link their applications and see what changed between major release

- GTK (its version 4) has merged support for Common Print Dialog Backends - universal print dialog, which can work not only with cups, but with other possible backends (like google cloud print)

- WIP on Printer Setup Tool for GNOME Control Center - full support for driverless printers and printers via printer applications

The full report is attached.

Zdenek