PPD Download broken for printers found via browsing

[Florian Pflug]

Hi

When browsing is enabled in cups, then the local cupsd reexports the printers found on the network. But not all requests to a printer are proxied by the local cupsd - the download of ppd files is an exception.

libgnomecups, however, tries to download the ppd file from the local cupsd, which fails, and then assumes that there is no ppd file, therefore presenting no options for the printer.

I patches libgnomecups by adding _gnome_cups_printer_get_ppd_host to gnome-cups-printer.c, and using that (instead of _gnome_cups_printer_get_host) in gnome_cups_printer_get_ppd.

_gnome_cups_printer_get_ppd_host look similar to _gnome_cups_printer_get_host but doesn't check go_directly_to_printer_when_possible - instead, it always parses the hostname out of the printer_uri. Since printer_uri is actually printer-supported-uri - which is used for the same purpose by original cups client library - my fix should make the behaviour of libgnomecups and libcupsys more similar.

[Florian Pflug (fgp)]

Arg. After posting this I found the "other" bugreport for this problem. But since my report included a way to fix it, I marked the other one as a duplicate of mine, altough he was first.

So, #50916 is now marked as a duplicate for this report.

[Florian Pflug (fgp)]

Hi

Here is the patch that fixes the problem for me.

Please do _something_ about this problem - it's a serious showstopper for anyone who wants to use printer browsing. And it's kind of embarrassing that everthing works flawlessly when using "kprinter", and breaks when using the gnome cups support :-(.

greetings, Florian Pflug

[Peter Adolphs (futzilogik)]

I think this bug should be fixed in the GNOME package. Have you looked for an upstream bug report at bugzilla.gnome.org?

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=170673 looks relevant to me

[Florian Pflug (fgp)]

I'll add my patch as an attachment to the gnome bug #170673 - but as this bugreport was submitted 2005-03-17 (!), I'm not too confident that they'll fix this soon.

Since ubuntu (or debian - don't know if the libgnomecups packages of debian and ubuntu differ) already includes custom patches to libgnomecups, it'd be nice if a custom patch was added for this problem if the gnome people don't fix it within the next few weeks.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug and patch. Martin, you probably know that code better, reassigning to you for opinion on the patch

[Florian Pflug (fgp)]

I just realized that my patch actually only fixes the gnome-cups-manager,
but not the printer dialog in gnome applications - at least not in firefox.

On a related note - I posted the same information to the gnome bugtracker
(http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=170673), and was informed
that libgnomecups is currently unmaintained :-(

So, it guess it's up to either the ubuntu or debian package maintainers
to fix this :-(

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Has a patch, will apply soon.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

This works very well, thank you!

 libgnomecups (0.2.2-5ubuntu1) edgy; urgency=low
 .
   * Add debian/patches/25_browsed_ppds.patch: Fix PPD retrieval for printers
     picked up with cups browsing. Thanks to Florian Pflug for the patch!
     Closes: LP#52867

[Martijn van Brummelen (martijn-brumit)]

This bug still effects me. Im using a local ppd file as a workaround, but I would prefer to use the remote ppd file.