From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031022 Description of problem: Our environment has over 500 networked (LPD) printers. There does not seem to be a way to add a new LPD printer at the command line, so I've written a Perl script to spit out a settings.xml file with entries for each of the printers, then I import that file: printconf-tui --Ximport settings.xml This works fine, but when I restart the cups daemon, it takes well over 5 minutes (on a 2.0GHz P4!) to start as it has to generate over 500 ppd files in /etc/cups/ppd/*.ppd This, too, would be fine if it only happened once, however, if I add one printer, regenerate and import settings.xml, and restart cups, it regenerates _all_ the *.ppd files. It regenerates all files regardless if I use --merge or --force with printconf-tui. I've tried adding a printer with --merge and only one printer in the settings.xml file, and I've tried with all 500+ printers in settings.xml and that doesn't affect it either. As long as an import was done, all *.ppd files are rebuilt. Is there a way to only generate *.ppd files for new printers, or better yet, a way to add LPD printers without having to go through import/export of the xml file? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): cups-1.1.17-13.3.6 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Generate a settings.xml file for new printer 2. Import it with printconf-tui 3. Restart cups and don't hold your breath Actual Results: Hurry up and wait. Expected Results: A delay of a few seconds or less.
This is a shortcoming of the design of the redhat-config-printer tool, and is something that only a re-write can fix. :-(( You *could* add LPD printers via the CUPS web interface, http://localhost:631/ -- but those printers won't be editable in the redhat-config-printer tool then. Closing this as DEFERRED, since it's not really something that an RHBA or anything can really address -- but it's an issue which a future release hopefully *will* address.