Avahi Printer advertisements are wrong (Avahi or CUPS?)

[MarkosJal]

First I do not know if this is a CUPS issue or an Avahi issue.

I do not know whether Avahi or CUPS generates the files nor where they are. They are not in /etc/avahi/services, where I expected to find them, so they must lie somewhere in CUPS.

I have a printer installed in CUPS. I must use the driver from a different model to make it work. Among other things I want avahi and CUPS to show the printer name, consistently unless related to the print driver used.

avahi-browse shows

Xerox_Phaser-6125 @ Hostname (correct)

Later however in Txt fields avahi-browse shows "product=(DocuPrint C525 A-AP)" .......... "ty=FX DocuPrint C525 A-AP v1.0" (incorrect printer model but is the driver in use. Those fields should relate to Product and type, not driver)

The problem above I suppose is the "trickle down effect" from how CUPS names the printer. In the CUPS web GUI I see

 Queue Name Description Location Make and Model Status
Xerox_Phaser-6125 Xerox_Phaser-6125 Home FX DocuPrint C525 A-AP v1.0 Idle - "Waiting for printer to finish."

The Make and Model is not Make and model at all, rather it comes from the driver used. I know it is commonplace to use say an HP LaserJet PS driver when you want PostScript , like back in the day when I printed to a LaserWriter, so I am not the only one that sees this.

Also, I think there should be a proper "representation" in the txt fields as well icon as is done with AirScan/eSCL scanners advertisements "representation=http://HOSTNAME./images/Icon.png" as I believe some apps will use this icon of the actual printer. This field should not be required but optional. These days we connect many different OSs to Linux and expect Linux to "do it all", and we still want it to look pretty and correct. I know Apple in some cases uses the "representation" field. This "representation" field too would have to tricke down from CUPS to Avahi, as Avahi would only point to the file at http://HOSTNAME:631/images/Icon.png. So it needs to hosted on the CUPS web GUI.

I also recently read that some distros are moving away from the GUI utilities to configure printers in favor of the CUPS web GUI , making this more relevant than ever.

Description: Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS
Release: 16.04

[Trent Lloyd (lathiat)]

This is a bug in CUPS ultimately, it's driving Avahi using the D-BUS API (as opposed to manual service files in /etc/avahi/services, this is only really used for a sysadmin to manually add services, most other types of advertisements such as printers are expected to use the API to advertise it).

Marking this against cups instead, you may also wish to consider filing it upstream:
https://github.com/apple/cups