Re: [9fans] Newbie question on printing

[Russ Cox <russcox@gmail.com>]

On 7/26/05, Jack Johnson <knapjack@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/26/05, Russ Cox <russcox@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Modern Unix printing is a catastrophe.  Plan 9 printing is only a mess.
> 
> What's your take on IPP?

I don't care which protocol is used on the network.  They all seem
simple enough.  It's the software on the ends that is the disaster.
CUPS in particular is enormous and seems to prevent me from 
printing more than it enables me to print.

My worst experience with CUPS was on Mac OS X.  I was trying
to configure the printing via the GUI (I didn't even know that CUPS
was underneath), and CUPS kept seg faulting.  It took hours 
before I figured that was why the printer service kept ending up
in the "off" state.

I admit that being able to expose printer capabilities to clients 
and have painless configuration is a great goal, and for Windows+CUPS
maybe it gets there, but sitting on Unix all I want to do is send
postscript and see the resulting pages come out of the printer.
And that is too hard far too often.

Amazingly, I think the Plan 9 lp is actually getting simpler as time
goes on.  Slowly.

Russ