Hi.  I'm actually reporting for my sandbox machine which runs aptosid,
so sid downstream (formerly Sidux).  It's up to date.  I've recently
run into updates that have successively blown away about four manual
installs of lprng.  "This's maddening!  Why doesn't it work today,
dammit?!?"  Ah, CUPS updates blew away lpr*.  !@#$

I would really appreciate it if you would institute an
/etc/default/print which would specify "this system's" preferred
printing system, and serve as a "Dammit! don't fsck with it!" for all
other programs.  PLEASE!!!

   /etc/default/print:

        # We prefer this daemon on this box!  Please choose, and damn
        # the installer/packager that fscks with this.  Possible
        # values are cups, lpr, lprng, and if empty, CUPS, and damn you to
        # ...
        #
        DAEMON=lprng

Please?  This shit's been going on for too damned long.  I've got my
printer's .ppd, and a five or so line long printcap.  I don't want or need
cups, so why does it continue to force itself upon my machines,
blowing away lprng?!?  Grr.  RAPE!

This should be easy.  Fwd: this to debian.devel.mentors; they should
see this needs doing.  Damnit.  :-)  Bon chance.

tags 616174 -patch
thanks

Which updates?

The only reason that LPRng would be replaced by CUPS is if a package
gets installed that recommends it or depends upon it.  Few packages
directly depend upon CUPS, it having a client-server architecture.
About the only one I see is hplip; are you using an HP printer?  If
not, which backend drivers do you need?

It may be the case that the dependencies can be tweaked to be better,
but you'll need to identify what you did and which packages are
responsible.  Do you have a record of what the updates were, or can
you reproduce it?

Are you installing recommends by default; this could be due to
something recommending CUPS.

This is not a configuration issue, it's a package dependency issue.
I've removed the patch tag because this isn't a solution to the
problem, and was not a working patch in any case.


Thanks,
Roger

Sorry.

----- Forwarded message from "s. keeling" <keeling@nucleus.com> -----
----- End forwarded message -----

Grr.

It's much more complicated than that (which is why alternatives won't
work either) because you have to have the right set of printer clients
working with the right daemon.

For that reason both systems conflict with each other, because not doing
that just causes a horrible mess. So one uninstalling the other is what
you want to happen.

What the problem is that the cups package is being installed and you're
not installing it. That must be a dependency doing that and possibly it
shouldn't be.  The main thing is, it's not a lprng bug.

 - Craig

Hi,

I'm in the same boat: Upgrading a box from Lenny with a perfectly fine
working LPRng install blew up and installed CUPS. Now only ASCII files
print, even after forcefully re-installing LPRng. For that matter,
things didn't print properly with CUPS, too.

Saying that it isn't a problem of the lprng package may be technically
correct, but at least I would be interested in what exactly to do:

Report the same bug against cups packages? Against all packages that
have "Recommends: cups"?

Drop lprng and forcefully move to CUPS (I usually like lprng much
better)?


Kind regards,
--Toni++

Incoming from Craig Small:

That's just wrong.  Anything that wants to print should just print to
the system print daemon.  It should not expect to find its preferred
print daemon waiting for it.  That's not how *nix is supposed to work.

I switched back to lprng some time ago, because I found it
easier to use that cups. I need foo2zjs for my HP-Laserjet.
Now the last version of foo2zjs ((20110210dfsg-1) depends on
cups-client:

(From the Changelog)
* debian/control:
      + Add dependency on cups and cups-client to ensure that
        automatic update of the PPDs of existing print queues works.

But cups-client conflicts with lprng! I would rather miss
the automatic updating than being forced to install and
configure cups again.


Regards,

Martin

PS: Hopefully I filed a bugreport  (#622125) against
foo2zjs.

There's a few of those out there and they're quite annoying for lprng
users.  Thanks for pointing it out.

 - Craig

(foo2zjs_20110722dfsg-1)

Martin