On Thu, Jul 31, 2003 at 02:52:04PM +0100, Ross Burton wrote: > On Thu, 2003-07-31 at 14:44, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote: > > The last time I tried to use CUPS, I found it to be so user friendly > > that I couldn't get it to do anything useful. Very pretty, less > > functional; and the documentation was entirely inadequate. > > > > On the other hand, while lprng was anything but user-friendly, it was > > simple and well-documented. Much more important to have something that > > works before you go making it user-friendly! > > As a random reply, I've found CUPS to be easy to admin and maintain. > There are actual documented APIs for accessing the print queue and > spooler, and printing worked first time, even when printing on an inkjet > printer on a Win98 box being shared across SMB. > > http://www.cups.org/documentation.php lists plenty of documentation, > which is generally quite good IMHO. > > However, I am biased, as I package the GNOME CUPS packages... :)
My perception was that CUPS suffers from ignoring the Unix philosophy - it only seems to work with CUPS printer drivers. There isn't one for my printer. There's a ghostscript driver, and damned if I could make foomatic work with an arbitrary ghostscript driver it didn't already know about. Maze of twisty little configuration files, all useless. I may be the only one, but I find printcap convenient. I may need a man page or example every time I touch it, but I know right where everything is! -- Daniel Jacobowitz MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer
