Comment 10 for bug 147551

I have withdrawn the proposed fix of moving the output to the ~/Desktop directory (and allowing cups-pdf to write to there) as this will have several problem. Users can configure another directory to be displayed on the desktop and also they could not like the desktop being cluttered by the generated PDFs. So we will leave the destination being "~/PDF", as no known application is using this directory.

The only solution in our environment with AppArmor-protected CUPS would be to have a user tool for changing the destination directory which changes both the cups-pdf and AppArmor config files and then we would have the problem of a tool running as an arbitrary normal user modifying the configuration of a central security subsystem. In general, a major redesign of the PDF generator CUPS queue concept by upstream would be needed for which it is too late to include it in Gutsy.

In general it is a much better solution to have the applications by themselves generating PDFs via "File"/"Export to PDF ..." or "File"/"Print ...". OpenOffice.org has "File"/"Export to PDF ..." and the current printing dialogs of both KDE and GNOME have functionality to print into a PDF file, actually saving it as PDF, asking the user for name and location. This is the most intuitive way and does not involve any system process which runs with other rights than the calling user, so it gives also the maximum security.

cups-pdf is an interim solution for all the apps which did not yet adopt the latest printing dialogs (especially Firefox and Thunderbird). So we will remove cups-pdf from Ubuntu as soon as all apps have caught up. In the mean time we will only sync with upstream and fix bugs.

The real bug is in the apps which do not use the current printing dialogs.