On Mon, 2010-11-22 at 12:53 -0800, Daniel Nicoletti wrote:
If you do the work as a GObject, Python
bindings will be more or less
automatic via gir.
href="http://live.gnome.org/GObjectIntrospection" target=_blank
The problem here is that GObject means glib which is not used in cups server.
As I've said before, I think it quite unlikely that this would ever be used by the CUPS server, but Michael Sweet would be the one with the answer to that.
In any case, whether a particular library does or does not use glib is only visible in terms of the dependencies pulled in. The end result would include an XML parser, of course, so glib is hardly the final straw when it comes to added dependencies!
well, at least to get all models iirc there is a get method for that, have to look at admin.c again.
Well, CUPS has no inherent notion of there being different models of printer. It only knows about different PPDs. A given PPD can declare its manufacturer (this is exposed by CUPS in the ppd-make attribute), and its "nickname", i.e. a combination of the model name, possibly including the manufacturer's name, and the driver used, often as well as other bits of information. This is exposed by CUPS in the ppd-make-and-model attribute.
This is why cupshelpers.ppds has a fairly expensive ppdMakeModelSplit() function: in order to collect together PPDs which are for the same physical printer model.
Well first to get the devices (done by qcups) and then to get the ppds list (done by pppds.py).
Ah. But cupshelpers.ppds doesn't interact with the CUPS service at all. It only processes an IPP result. Think of the PPDs object as the representation of a set of PPDs, and the actions you'd like to perform with them.
What I see in master is both ppds.py and the xml.py thing so I didn't knew ppds.py was deprecated.
No, ppds.py is not deprecated, but the interface it provides is substantially different. The "old" interface gave only one PPD, the "best", when matching a Device ID; the "new" interface gives an ordered list of all the appropriate drivers, in descending order of preference. This allows the interface to present choices based on the Device ID from the printer, something that allows the user to be more sure of getting their printer to work.
For example, if a particular printer is driven by gutenprint (and gutenprint declares the Device ID of that printer in its PPD), the "best" printer driver might be gutenprint. But if that driver doesn't work, the user has to look for other drivers. There may only be generic drivers as alternatives, and we can only offer those based on the Device ID's "CMD" field.
Another important change is that instead of having a status code to describe how well the driver matches to the printer, now a string is used, the "fit", e.g. "exact-cmd" (meaning that the model name matches exactly, and the CMD field positively matches the declared command sets of the PPD), "exact" (meaning just that model name matches), etc. This provides more information than the status codes.
The work belongs in system-config-printer, not in pycups (which is just what it says and no more). There are already exported interfaces in system-config-printer such as the Python cupshelpers modules -- including cupshelpers/ppds.py, which is what we're talking about.
well but in C you could access them through pycups which, would be the same thing in the end I think.
I'm not sure I follow you. The pycups project is separate from system-config-printer. They are separate tarballs, and have quite distinct aims.
Well if it doesn't get accepted by upstream we can patch it downstream easily I think. It would be pretty handy since most printing servers I see the admins only use the cups server interface.
I don't favour this approach at all. If it belongs in the CUPS server, it should go in the CUPS server; if it does not, it shouldn't. I trust Michael Sweet's judgement on whether it belongs there.
What would be the point of having a forked CUPS project with this extra IPP operation? It could not be relied upon by anyone, since they would need to be compatible with the "real" CUPS project as well.
Which "downstream" are you thinking of, in any case?
Tim. */