about backporting to 3.5

[Goffioul Michael]

> 1) upon wizard startup, automatically (and in background) 
> launch all registered backends, without requiring 
> intervention from the user, and collect all auto-detectable 
> printers available to the system. That would mean at least 
> locally connected usb printers (hotplug scan), samba printers 
> (samba scan?), ipp network printers (port 631 scan) and, most 
> importantly, cups network servers. Auto-configure all 
> detected printers as much as possible, filling in sensible 
> defaults. Flag the printers that can't be autoconfigured.

Normally, local printers are already detected by CUPS and you can
retrieve the list through a CUPS request. This is already implemented
in the "Local" page of the wizard. Local printer discovery is quite
hardware dependent; outsourcing it to CUPS makes like simpler.
For network printers, you might still have to scan the network
"manually", but maybe CUPS can help also here (I've been told a few
years ago that CUPS-1.2 would bring improvements in printer discovery
process).

Regarding printer configuration, something I had in mind but never
found to the time to implement it, is to provide a way to grab a
printer driver from a centralized driver location, like
linuxprinting.org.
For the moment, you need a local PPD file.

Michael.