Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 50322
Missing drivers (cdj970 & hpijs) - byzantine upgrade scheme
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:35:17 EDT
This bug report starts by noting the two printer drivers I want are not included: cdj970 - Driver supporting duplexing (2-sided printing) on HP. hpijs - HP's official semi-free driver for HP inkjet printers. But it continues. It appears printing is now so "automatic" and "microsoft like" that I can't just select a printer driver, I must use the (possibly correct) printer database. That's OK, I suppose, but moving in the wrong direction. The bug report continues. With most things RedHat and Linux the configuration files (while never documented by RedHat) are easy to parse. The files affected by a RedHat GUI (while never documented by RedHat) can be easily found. Not so with printing any more. Even HP http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net/binaryinstall.php and LinuxPrinting http://www.linuxprinting.org indicate that whatever RedHat has done with "alchemist" (and whatever that is), is too much. RedHat seems to have rendered this subsystem non-upgradable. Please don't do that. Let us have a modular, upgradable printing subsystem. I don't want to rip out the RedHat printing and start from scratch. Please provide some path to get new drivers in, and either use standard setups, or document the weirdness.
well. The ghostscript I've put together for the next release is all singing and all dancing, so you should have fewer driver issues. The printing database comes from www.linuxprinting.org, and is my best bet. I am working /towards/ modular, but am not there yet. The old printtool approach was anything but, people were just used to hacking on it. Alchemist is /much/ better documented in the new version, and the python bindings are clean. The underlying data layer makes some very sweet configuration merging possible, but again, only rudimentary support exists so far. Anyway. This bug seems to be: "I liked it the old way, and I want explicit control" Well, I hated the old way, and I want to give you explicit control. I am trying to add an "explicit" option, for people who know what they are doing; but I dont want to add a bad one. In general, explicit bugs get better results than "I dont like it."
Actually it's more of a "I'm so confused by the mess I have not the foggiest idea what to suggest". The ability to take up-to-date or beta releases of Ghostscript / Foomatic and the like is certainly part of it. Some man pages for the redhat tools -- giving some clue as to what the effect, would also be a part of it.
Like bryce, I also want to be able to install those exact two drivers mentioned above, cdj970 (from www.harsch.net) and hpijs from HP (could it be we both have the HP970Cxi and bought it because of its duplex feature?). Is there any info available at all to help in adding printer drivers in the current scheme? I just want to be able to get on with life...
I am now off of the hack line for the next release. We use a standard foomatic backend now, AND the cdj970 driver is compiled in and the hpijs drivers work if you download them from HP.