Comment 3 for bug 807261

Current status:

system-config-printer continues to work correctly if cups-pk-helper is not installed.

If cups-pk-helper is installed, the password dialog appears. Choosing a user with system admin privileges and entering his password makes system-config-printer working normally. "Cancel" on the dialog makes system-config-printer not being able to do administrative tasks with CUPS, even listing available printers (equivalent of "lpinfo -m") does not work. If one SSHes into the machine from a remote box and starts system-config-printer, the password dialog does not appear and system-config-printer has no admin access to CUPS, the user has no chance to authenticate.

What I expect is that if the caller of system-config-printer is in the "lpadmin" group (or root), no password dialog should appear and all admin access to CUPS should be possible. If system-config-printer is called by another user, the password dialog should appear and admin access should be granted if the user who logs in is either root, or in the "lpadmin" group, or a user who can do root tasks in Ubuntu via "sudo" (like the first user). This should work independent whether the user is logged in via SSH or locally.

Currently, cups-pk-helper is recommended by the gnome-shell package which has made it getting installed with one of recent updates.

Why does gnome-shell recommend cups-pk-helper? We especially need to take into account that we have hidden away the new printer setup tool of GNOME completely in Ubuntu. Should we perhaps drop the Recommends?

Generally, system-config-printer should work with cups-pk-helper. cups-pk-helper needs to be configured/fixed so that it supports the "lpadmin" group (and also users logged in via SSH).

If cups-pk-helper cannot be fixed for Oneiric, we need to let cups-pk-helper and system-config-printer conflict, which would suppress the fulfilling of the "Recommends: cups-pk-helper" in gnome-shell when system-config-printer is installed. If we do so, in which package the conflict should be defined? cups-pk-helper or system-config-printer?