My ideas for a new printing system

[Remco Poelstra]

Hi,

Let me first introduce myself, sine you people probably never heard 
about me :).
I'm a student at the Eindhoven University of Technology. With a team of 
4 students we are responsible for Linux support at the faculty of 
Electrical Engineering.

Tim Waugh asked me to help thinking about a new printing solution, as a 
reply on a mail of me on the config list.
I read the posts here about that subject and I would like to share my 
opinion on this matter:

First I would like to state that there won't be any solution if CUPS 
doesn't improve.

The problem that eggcups tries to adress (authentication) isn't solved 
if there is a chain of CUPS servers involved. If CUPS can't communicate 
back, then the user still can't authenticate. So CUPS should implement a 
2-way IPP protocol.
Then eggcups can be reduced to listening to HAL messages in order to 
display the print queue and pop up authentication dialogs. By not 
implementing a full CUPS server, it has less system resource usage, 
which is a good thing I think.
Second if CUPS supports signed browse packets, than we have an 'easy' 
solution of identifying fake printers on a large network.

For the configuration part: gnome-cups-manager does quite a nice job on 
this.
Than we only need some decend tool to configure the server itself.

Just my 2 cents,

Remco Poelstra