FHS violation?

[Chris Jones]

Binary package hint: cups

From the CUPS documentation:

'The CUPS scheduler (cupsd) uses the /etc/cups/subscriptions.conf file to store the list of active subscriptions'

/etc/ is an incorrect place to store (what is presumably) transient information like this, surely?

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

This is an upstream problem of CUPS, not specific to Ubuntu. CUPS will behave the same way on any other Linux distribution and also on Mac OS X. Please report this problem on the upstream bug tracker http://www.cups.org/str.php.

[Chris Jones (cmsj)]

I have filed this upstream at http://www.cups.org/str.php?L3018 but Launchpad does not appear to want to link directly to that bug, presumably because cups use a weird bug tracker that LP does not recognise.

Either way, I do not thing the bug should be marked Invalid in Ubuntu, since the bug does exist there. It is useful for tracking purposes if nothing else.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Agreed. Thanks for sending upstream

[LaMont Jones (lamont)]

Better yet, how about we develop a patch to move the STATE information out of the CONFIG file, and into /var/lib/cups or so where it properly belongs, and then file a new bug upstream with the patch, since upstream decided that they won't fix this bug, since they see no difference between configuration and state info.

(Yes, it means writing and reading two files instead of one, and actually knowing what is config and what is state... 'Status: disconnected' isn't part of the configuration, it's STATE.)

Meanwhile, maybe I'll just cron a "sed -i /Time/d /etc/cups/printers.conf" so that it will stop being a modified file in /etc every time cups is restarted...

lamont

[LaMont Jones (lamont)]

And filed a new bug upstream, complete with firefox vs itsalltext fallout:

http://www.cups.org/str.php?L3067

lamont

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Mike Sweet (upstream author of CUPS) did not accept your suggestion for two times now. As we do not want to have maintenance nightmares with an overpatched CUPS (or any other overpatched packages) we try to keep the packages as close as possible to upstream and therefore we will not implement your suggestion by a Ubuntu-specific patch.

Therefore I am closing this bug with "Won't fix" now.

[avdd (avdd)]

This is ridiculous.

Upstream is clearly confused about the difference between "state" and "configuration", but has at least suggested that packages be configured using --with-serverroot (much like many other daemon packages in debiuntu).

Please package with this option and stop cups pooping in my /etc

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

Till, would you be willing to explore that option?

[Didier Raboud (odyx)]

Maintainer voiced his opinion, that's IMHO clear: this will not get fixed by a
_very_ (and hard to maintain) invasive distribution-specific patch in Debian nor
Ubuntu. Unless someone comes with a patch and some guarantees to maintain the
patch on the long term, it will just not happen by painting that issue as
ridiculous.

That said, there's still some hope for a future solution, see
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=692791#101 from Michael Sweet,
upstream author:

> *If* we move to a non-editable format in the future (likely for CUPS 2.0) we
> will definitely restructure things to put those files in /var/lib.
>
> I don't advise that you try to patch current CUPS to use /var/lib/cupsd for
> cupsd stuff and /etc/cups for everything else since the current code assumes
> that all CUPS configuration files are in one location. The patch will be
> very very messy and hard to maintain.

Cheers, OdyX, with his Debian Printing Team (including some cups fiddling) hat on