Re: [PLUG] CUPS (was Re: Without OS X)

["William H. Magill" <magill@mcgillsociety.org>]

On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, at 02:30  PM, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
> > The problem with CUPS is that even though it is a GOOD idea, it is a 
> > NEW idea, and not (yet) a mainstream idea.
>
> 	Sorry, but you are wrong on this one.  CUPS has been around for 10 
> years now, pretty close to predating Linux ;).  It is available for 
> all the major Unix platforms, and has been for years.

I don't know where you got the idea that CUPS is 10 years old -- only 7 
if you stretch things back to the first time the idea was proposed.

From the IETF's PWG website for IPP:
"In the summer of 1996, Novell approached a number of companies to find 
out  if they were interested to participate in a printing protocol 
project for the  Internet. ...   At this stage, the project was known 
as Lightweight Document Printing  Application (LDPA). ..."

The first RFCs didn't appear for 3 years --- 2566/67/68/69
      - - -
Network Working Group                                          S. Zilles
Request for Comments: 2568                            Adobe Systems Inc.
Category: Experimental                                        April 1999


         Rationale for the Structure of the Model and Protocol
                   for the Internet Printing Protocol
     - - -

And CUPS is based on IPP. The Source Forge project was started in 
January of 2000.

According to cups.org, the only vendors supporting CUPS are:
	Apple
	Caldera
	Conectiva
	Mandrake Linux
	MIZI
	Lycoris
	Peanut
	RedHat
	Suse

(The claim of "support" by SuSE is interesting. My distribution (7.0 
Alpha) comes up with lpd support, not CUPS, by default.)

There are implementations (but not vendor supported) for:
	AIX,
	Debian,
	FreeBSD
	HP-UX
	IRIX
	NetBSD
	OpenBSD
	Solaris
	Tru64 Unix
	TurboLinux

So, while there are implementations "available" for all of the 
mainstream Unix distributions, no vendor yet supports them (i.e. 
includes CUPS in their distribution and provides support for it). And, 
Apple is the only *BSD player which supports it. Of course, what is not 
listed in this list is the fact that Microsoft and Novel have had IPP 
implementations (but apparently not CUPS) for their various OS for 
several years.

> 	Why do you need a GUI to CUPS?  What would you do with it?

CUPS does have a GUI, which, since it is apparently little known about, 
could prove to be (is?) a security issue. The CUPS daemon listens on 
port 631 -- the IPP port -- and responds to simple html commands.



T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org
magill@mac.com

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