[Kde-print-devel] [Bug 112536] New: kprinter fails to detect options for cups printer classes

[Patrick Gosling]

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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=112536         
           Summary: kprinter fails to detect options for cups printer
                    classes
           Product: kdeprint
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: SuSE RPMs
        OS/Version: Linux
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: NOR
         Component: general
        AssignedTo: kde-print-devel kde org
        ReportedBy: jpmg eng cam ac uk


Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.3.0)
Installed from:    SuSE RPMs
OS:                Linux

If a CUPS printer class is selected, rather than a printer, kprinter fails to determine an appropriate set of options.  This is sort of understandable - a printer class doesn't have a PPD file available for it;  indeed CUPS itself appears to be dodging thinking about this problem.

It's not completely clear to me what _should_ be done if two different printers with different PPDs are members of the same class;  however, it should be noted that the cups command "lpoptions -p classname -l" does something reasonable (although inspection reveals that it just queries the first available printer listed for the class).

In an ideal world, I suppose that both lpoptions and kprinter should work with the intersection of the PPDs for all available printers in the class - ie any options that are applicable to all the printers in the class should be made available to the user.

Indeed, I wonder if the correct solution isn't for CUPS to produce a virtual PPD for each class (since it would only have to do the work of calculating the intersection of PPDs each time the set of available printers in the class changed), accessible via "GET /classes/classname.ppd" by analogy with "GET /printers/printername.ppd" .