The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

Posted Feb 27, 2004 3:04 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
Parent article: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

A lot of people have said, "I use CUPS, it works great!" These people use CUPS to print small files to a local printer. They certainly don't use CUPS in a heavy-duty networked environment.

Ever clicked on the Cancel button? CUPS often gets wedged (especially if it's a big doc or going over the network). Because it never prints any error messages (just helpful web pages like "client-error-forbidden"), it gives you no clue as to what went wrong or how to fix it. *I* submitted the job, why should I be forbidden from cancelling it?? More than once I've purged all traces of CUPS from my system and reinstalled from scratch just to get my printer working again. (Simply clearing the queue and restarting CUPS doesn't do it).

I REFUSE to learn the inner workings of my print spooler. It's stupid that I have to babysit CUPS every few months. I asked about the crappy error messages three years ago, and the reply was that they were stalled on the internationalization and it should be fixed in six months. Ha.

Unfortunately, lprng also requires deep knowledge to set up and use. Printing on other platforms is trivial -- I don't know why Linux insists on making it so hard. For once, I actually agree with ESR.

check your assumptions

Posted Feb 27, 2004 4:46 UTC (Fri) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link]

You may think that people only print small files to local computers, but posting that remark
unchecked is a bit derogatory. I use CUPS under SUSE in a heavily networked environment.
There is no local printer attached to the computer. It works.

You do seem to know about CUPS, though; enough to have found the deadlock which
requires editing /etc/cups/whatever, to make the printer work again. As stated before: the
kde print manager does away with that hand editing ... provided CUPS knows that you're
allowed to edit that (silly password requirement).

I share your pain

Posted Feb 27, 2004 12:55 UTC (Fri) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

Aah, yes - my good friends 'client-error-not-found' and 'client-error-forbidden'.

The error reporting in the low-level CUPS apps _does_ need a lot of work.

That said - in fairness, most of the time it does it's job very well.