[Pkg-cups-devel] Bug#319093: cupsys: printers sometimes stop working after upgrade (ppds not refreshed)

[Marcin Kasperski]

Package: cupsys
Version: 1.1.23-10
Severity: normal


For a few times, on different machines, working with debian sarge when
it was testing and when it recently matured to stable, I observed the
following situations:

- I have configured, working printer (managed by cups)
- after some apt-get update printing just stops to work
  (I analysed it deeper once, it finished to be problem with
   incorrect filters configured)
- simple walk through CUPS web interface 'configure printer'
  option (accepting defaults hinted according to the previous config)
  causes printing to work again

I am not sure what exactly is happening here but it seems to me that
some printer characteristics or filter selections are updated when I
re-configure the printer.

I do not know whether it is possible to solve this problem completely
(it would of course be nice if necessary updates happened when
packages are updated). I am also unable to specify exact version
numbers for all the situations (version specified here respond to the
system on which I just performed 'walk' to restore printing but I do
not remember when exactly it stopped working, it was no more than 3
months ago but thats all what I remember). Therefore I do not expect
this bug to be formally 'solved'. I file it because I think that
somebody who knows cups internals better than me can imagine how the
current upgrade process can be improved.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8
Locale: LANG=pl_PL, LC_CTYPE=pl_PL (charmap=ISO-8859-2)

Versions of packages cupsys depends on:
ii  adduser                     3.64         Add and remove users and groups
ii  debconf                     1.4.51       Debian configuration management sy
ii  libc6                       2.3.2.ds1-22 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libcupsimage2               1.1.23-10    Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - 
ii  libcupsys2-gnutls10         1.1.23-10    Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - 
ii  libgnutls11                 1.0.16-13.1  GNU TLS library - runtime library
ii  libpam0g                    0.76-22      Pluggable Authentication Modules l
ii  libpaper1                   1.1.14-3     Library for handling paper charact
ii  libslp1                     1.2.1-2      OpenSLP libraries
ii  patch                       2.5.9-2      Apply a diff file to an original
ii  perl-modules                5.8.7-3      Core Perl modules
ii  xpdf-utils                  3.00-13      Portable Document Format (PDF) sui
ii  zlib1g                      1:1.2.2-4    compression library - runtime

Versions of packages cupsys recommends:
ii  cupsys-client                 1.1.23-10  Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - 
ii  gs-esp                        7.07.1-9   The Ghostscript PostScript interpr
ii  smbclient                     3.0.14a-3  a LanManager-like simple client fo

-- debconf information:
  cupsys/raw-print: true
  cupsys/backend: ipp, lpd, parallel, socket, usb