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On 29/09/11 16:36, tom wrote: > On 29/09/11 16:24, Adrian Midgley wrote: >> CUPS is farily horrid. ESR blasted it a while back. But printing is >> generally rather horrid. I don't see why. >> > Because people make a huge amount of money out of it. That leads to > multiple incompatible specs and associated management problems. > Another 'problem' is security - something windows teaches us to ignore > but it you have ever seen 'cheques' pouring out of a line printer or > better still a very very high level security document miss sent to a > 'public' printer for the world to read you may realise that nothing is > simple - no matter how much you want it to be. Indeed, several of the points ESR complains about are for security, or refer to some imagined nirvana in non free software. Certainly my experience of printing with other OSes is equally dreadful if not worse. CUPS on Debian, and most OSes automatically disabled auto-discovery, this is probably a good idea, since experience is that services on by default get abused. Yes the software should put up a big screen when you use it first saying this, but it doesn't because the authors didn't think about security. A classic of the non-free world being the Office network printer, set it up on the server, old Windows clients see the server queue (because an admin set it up, not some magical auto-detect), install a driver and are ready. Newer Windows clients have to have a different print driver because no one wrote (or relabelled the driver that works) for XP or newer. You discover this by eventually reading the common problems with this printer on the HP website. It is not printing being complained about in ESR's rant, those who read it will note that the printer works fine, he wants to share it via the network which introduces the vagaries of networking, and he wants to do this without knowing what sort of networking technology is in use to share it. Ironically it would have "just worked" aside from the decision to disable the functionality for security reasons. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq