Description of problem: Multiple USB printers are handled badly, and sometimes a single USB printer shows up multiple times. USB probe needs re-writing using Till's (much simpler) method. (Similar issue in kudzu: multiple USB printers aren't handled.)
Just running the USB backend with no args and parsing the output is probably the easiest way to fix printconf.
*** Bug 100425 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 119075 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 119970 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Any progress on this? I have two USB printers, and under FC3, it seems like I have to power them on in an appropriate order for things to work right (i.e. the order I used when I first ran system-config-printers I think) This is annoying, and not something I really want to explain to my wife:-) Also, despite having a queue setup for my HP Deskjet 932c, every time I turn it on, something creates a new queue for it, and I have to manually delete it each time... Also, if I manually edit /etc/cups/printers.conf to use a DeviceURI of usb://HP/DeskJet%20930C?serial=xxxxx instead of the auto-generated usb:/dev/usb/lpN, something will over-write my changes whenever I power on this printer. This is extremely annoying, since it means that I can't manually fix the problem - the system automatically re-creates it.
I hope to fix this for FC4.
*** Bug 176385 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Stephen: See bug #176385 for a workaround. If you set up symlinks and configure print queues to use those -- ignoring the automatically created print queues altogether -- then it shouldn't matter which order the printers turn up in. The annoyance is that you have to ignore the extra print queues which turn up when you're choosing printers, but that shouldn't be so hard to explain. Especially as the automatically generated queues can't be shared (even if you do share them, it forgets all your settings every time it deletes and recreates those queues), so the only queues your box should be _exporting_ are the ones you create yourself.
In FC6 it uses CUPS for this.
Just as some feedback - I just installed F8 on my laptop and the printer setup stuff looks much better now. I haven't actually upgraded my server from FC3 (my laptop still uses that as the backend via IPP), so I don't know if the specific problems I reported here are fixed, but overall, things are much simpler on the client side these days. Thanks for all the good work in this area.