From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.2) Gecko/20040301 Description of problem: Cups appears to obsolete LPRng unconditionally. From the spec file: # Obsoletes LPRng unconditionally. Obsoletes: lpd lpr LPRng Provides: lpd lpr LPRng = 3.8.15-3 This is a terribly broken behavior, for several reasons: 1) CUPS does not nearly provide the functionality available in LPRng (for example, you cannot print to lpd queues which use GSSAPI/krb5 auth). If RedHat no longer desires to support or package LPRng, that's fine, but preventing anyone from using it seems like a poor business decision. LPRng can happily coexist with CUPS (that's kind of the whole point of /etc/alternatives). Is there a good reason why CUPS refuses to play nice? I am completely baffled as to why RedHat has taken this "our way or the highway" approach to printing. 2) If someone chooses to package LPRng and install it on their RedHat Enterprise system, and use /etc/alternatives to switch the printing systems, it will happily work. However, because of the unconditional Obsoletes line in the spec file, up2date becomes convinced that cups is out of date, and attempts to replace it. However, cups is install installed. So update attempts to replace cups-1.1.17-13.3.6 with cups-1.1.17-13.3.6 and discovers (of course) that it's already installed, and bails. I do understand the need to obsolete older versions of LPRng that RedHat packaged, but surely the line could be changed to obsolete everything below 3.8.15. This unfortunate problem with up2date and cups has put a serious hitch in MIT's plans to distribute kerberized lpr printing functionality to our user community. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): cups-1.1.17-13.3.6 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install cups. 2. Create a package of LPRng that is specifically designed to play nice with CUPS and /etc/alternatives and not clobber anything. 3. Install said package. 4. Run up2date and watch it want to replace CUPS with the same version as is already installed. 5) Watch up2date fail, because it can't do that. Actual Results: "Package cups-1.1.17-13.3.6 conflicts with installed package cups-1.1.17-13.3.6" Expected Results: CUPS and LPRng should be able to coexist, just like they did for years in previous RedHat versions. Additional info:
Yes, this obsolete tag should be versioned as you suggest.
So, can we expect to see this in an update soon, or will this have to wait for RHEL 4?
The fix will appear in any future CUPS update for RHEL 3, as well as RHEL 4.
It is disappointing that this fix was not deemed worthy on its own to drive an updated CUPS package for RHEL 3 update 3.