cups ppd files

[Paul Howarth]

Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Aug 2006, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> 
>> Jeff Vian wrote:
>>
>>>> To me it is just one more piece of evidence
>>>> that whoever wrote this program did not think carefully enough
>>>> about what precisely the program is meant to do.
>>>>
>>> They did think carefully.  The present usage handles probably at least
>>> 99+% of all cases.
>>
>> Do you mean that system-config-printer sets up a printer correctly
>> in > 99% of cases?
>> Where do you get your figures from?
>>
>> I have what I take to be a pretty standard system -
>> printer attached to the parallel port on my desktop,
>> and accessed from various laptops and other computers -
>> and none of the printer wizards has _ever_ worked for me
>> on any machine except the desktop itself.
> 
> I have the same setup and system-config-printer works fine for me.  (I 
> use lpd to print from my Windows machines, though).
> 
> So from the sample so far, system-config-printer works fine for at least 
> 50% of such basic setups 8^).
> 
>>
>> The CUPS web interface on port 631 always works,
>> although the documentation is not very good, IMHO.
>>
>> Even the Windows XP wizard works reasonably well.
>>
>>> The present config ensures that anyone running these programs (with
>>> default paths/permissions) has root authority, and makes sure that the
>>> program itself does not have to be SUID root.  SUID root was the earlier
>>> configuration, and is a security risk.
>>
>> That seems perfectly sensible to me.
>> But I don't see why it requires you to have two different programs
>> with the same name.
> 
> I don't really get this either.  All of the system-config utilities in 
> /usr/bin are symlinked to consolehelper.  Many have no /usr/sbin 
> counterpart.  Yet they seem to start just fine when invoked as root.
> 
> My guess is that the /usr/sbin ones are artifacts of a pre-consolehelper 
> era and could be removed with no ill effects.

You guess wrong. That would cause them to stop working. Consolehelper is 
not some super-configuration utility replacing all of the 
system-config-* programs, it's just a simple wrapper that prompts for 
the root password, switches to root (assuming the passwird was correct) 
and runs the requested program from /usr/sbin.

Paul.