[gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?

[gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Gentoo.

I'm getting back to trying to update my system again, after having lost
the thread back in February.  I've lost hour after hour after hour with
portage's failure to maintain consistency in its internal structures on
my system.  Sometimes I think it would have been better for me to have
just given up, bought a new PC and installed some other distribution on
it.

Anyhow, after a recommendation from Sebastian Luther at Gentoo, I ran
emerge with debugging enabled, thusly:

    emerge -p --backtrack=100 --debug icu &> emerge-debug.log

.  It failed, of course, as usual.  But in the middle of the debugging
output (which is 147k lines long), appeared this:

    ....
    ....
    [ebuild     U  ] app-text/ghostscript-gpl-9.10-r2 [9.05-r1] LINGUAS="-de%"
    [ebuild  r  U  ] net-print/cups-filters-1.0.53 [1.0.36-r1] USE="dbus%* foomatic%*"
    [blocks b      ] <net-print/cups-filters-1.0.36-r2 ("<net-print/cups-filters-1.0.36-r2" is blocking app-text/ghostscript-gpl-9.10-r2)
    [ebuild  r  U  ] app-text/evince-3.10.3 [3.8.3] USE="-libsecret%"
    [blocks B      ] net-print/foomatic-filters ("net-print/foomatic-filters" is blocking net-print/cups-filters-1.0.53)
    [blocks B      ] >=net-print/cups-filters-1.0.43-r1[foomatic] (">=net-print/cups-filters-1.0.43-r1[foomatic]" is blocking net-print/foomatic-filters-4.0.17-r1)

     * Error: The above package list contains packages which cannot be
     * installed at the same time on the same system.

      (net-print/cups-filters-1.0.53::gentoo, ebuild scheduled for merge) pulled in by
        net-print/cups-filters:0 required by @__auto_slot_operator_replace_installed__
        >=net-print/cups-filters-1.0.43-r1[foomatic] required by (net-print/foomatic-filters-ppds-20070501::gentoo, installed)
        >=net-print/cups-filters-1.0.30 required by (net-print/cups-1.6.4::gentoo, installed)
        net-print/cups-filters required by (net-print/foomatic-filters-4.0.17-r1::gentoo, installed)

      (net-print/foomatic-filters-4.0.17-r1::gentoo, installed) pulled in by
        net-print/foomatic-filters required by @selected
        net-print/foomatic-filters required by (net-print/cups-1.6.4::gentoo, installed)

.   What is all this trying to tell me?  I've tried for over an hour to
make sense of it, but my eyes just glaze over.  My best guess is that
cups-filters and foomatic-filters are packages which can't be installed
together.  But I _need_ foomatic-filters - otherwise my printer doesn't
print.  Or do I?  cups-filters seems to be needed by cups.

What _are_ cups-filters and foomatic-filters?  emerge -s is little help
here.  Why do I need both of them?

How do I disentangle my system?

Help, please!

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Sun, 8 Jun 2014 15:48:09 +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

>       (net-print/cups-filters-1.0.53::gentoo, ebuild scheduled for
> merge) pulled in by net-print/cups-filters:0 required by
> @__auto_slot_operator_replace_installed__
>         >=net-print/cups-filters-1.0.43-r1[foomatic] required by
>         >(net-print/foomatic-filters-ppds-20070501::gentoo, installed)
>         >=net-print/cups-filters-1.0.30 required by
>         >(net-print/cups-1.6.4::gentoo, installed)  
>         net-print/cups-filters required by
> (net-print/foomatic-filters-4.0.17-r1::gentoo, installed)

Does the emerge output somewhere include an update to cups? If the
installed and new versions have different dependencies you may see this.

Remove cups-filters and foomatic-filters, update cups and then run the
world update.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Every time I jump on the bandwagon all its wheels fall off.

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Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Neil.

On Sun, Jun 08, 2014 at 05:11:20PM +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Sun, 8 Jun 2014 15:48:09 +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> >       (net-print/cups-filters-1.0.53::gentoo, ebuild scheduled for
> > merge) pulled in by net-print/cups-filters:0 required by
> > @__auto_slot_operator_replace_installed__
> >         >=net-print/cups-filters-1.0.43-r1[foomatic] required by
> >         >(net-print/foomatic-filters-ppds-20070501::gentoo, installed)
> >         >=net-print/cups-filters-1.0.30 required by
> >         >(net-print/cups-1.6.4::gentoo, installed)  
> >         net-print/cups-filters required by
> > (net-print/foomatic-filters-4.0.17-r1::gentoo, installed)

> Does the emerge output somewhere include an update to cups? If the
> installed and new versions have different dependencies you may see this.

Yes, I think it did.

> Remove cups-filters and foomatic-filters, update cups and then run the
> world update.

Well, the first bit of that went well indeed.  Updating cups pulled in
cups-filters but not foomatic-filters.  Printing now seems to work
without the latter.

As for a world update, I'm still summoning up the courage.  I might let
that run overnight, after doing a backup.

Thanks for the help!

> -- 
> Neil Bothwick

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?

[Andreas K. Huettel]

Am Sonntag, 8. Juni 2014, 17:48:09 schrieb Alan Mackenzie:
> .   What is all this trying to tell me?  I've tried for over an hour to
> make sense of it, but my eyes just glaze over.  My best guess is that
> cups-filters and foomatic-filters are packages which can't be installed
> together.  But I _need_ foomatic-filters - otherwise my printer doesn't
> print.  Or do I?  cups-filters seems to be needed by cups.
> 
> What _are_ cups-filters and foomatic-filters?  emerge -s is little help
> here.  Why do I need both of them?

* cups-filters is a former part of cups that provides file format conversions 
(among other things). Basically it (also) makes sure that everything is 
internally converted to PDF. It's not part of CUPS (as maintained by Apple) 
anymore, but hard-required by CUPS on Linux (and maintained by the Linux 
Foundation). 

* foomatic-filters is a set of printer drivers, basically. 

* Some time ago the cups-filters maintainers took over maintainership of the 
foomatic-filters part for CUPS as well, and integrated it cleanly into cups-
filters. That's the reason for the blocker; recent cups-filters contain the 
newest foomatic code available. The former separate foomatic-filters package 
is now unmaintained.

So, we have the following possibilities for installation: 

1) normal CUPS user, recommended, this is what comes by default (unless you do 
something stupid such as USE="-*")
net-print/cups
net-print/cups-filters[foomatic]

2) NOT recommended, dead code, unmaintained: 
net-print/cups
net-print/cups-filters[-foomatic]
net-print/foomatic-filters

3) for the stone age people out there, NOT recommended, dead code, 
unmaintained:
any other printing system, e.g. lprng
net-print/foomatic-filters

So, what's wrong in your case? No idea, but after longish not-updating things 
do get hard for emerge to unravel. My recommendation is, since foomatic-
filters and cups-filters are only needed for printing and emerge runs fine 
without them, force-remove both and let emerge figure out the right package 
set from scratch.  

[This basically works with any blocker as a last resort, but can be *very* 
dangerous for packages that are needed by the core system. You definitely 
don't want to remove gcc or glibc this way, for example. :)]

emerge -aC net-print/cups-filters net-print/foomatic-filters
emerge -uDNavt --backtrack=100 world

Cheers, 
Andreas

-- 
Andreas K. Huettel
Gentoo Linux developer (council, kde)
dilfridge@gentoo.org
http://www.akhuettel.de/

Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?

[Alan McKinnon]

On 08/06/2014 19:15, Andreas K. Huettel wrote:
> Am Sonntag, 8. Juni 2014, 17:48:09 schrieb Alan Mackenzie:
>> .   What is all this trying to tell me?  I've tried for over an hour to
>> make sense of it, but my eyes just glaze over.  My best guess is that
>> cups-filters and foomatic-filters are packages which can't be installed
>> together.  But I _need_ foomatic-filters - otherwise my printer doesn't
>> print.  Or do I?  cups-filters seems to be needed by cups.
>>
>> What _are_ cups-filters and foomatic-filters?  emerge -s is little help
>> here.  Why do I need both of them?
> 
> * cups-filters is a former part of cups that provides file format conversions 
> (among other things). Basically it (also) makes sure that everything is 
> internally converted to PDF. It's not part of CUPS (as maintained by Apple) 
> anymore, but hard-required by CUPS on Linux (and maintained by the Linux 
> Foundation). 
> 
> * foomatic-filters is a set of printer drivers, basically. 
> 
> * Some time ago the cups-filters maintainers took over maintainership of the 
> foomatic-filters part for CUPS as well, and integrated it cleanly into cups-
> filters. That's the reason for the blocker; recent cups-filters contain the 
> newest foomatic code available. The former separate foomatic-filters package 
> is now unmaintained.
> 
> So, we have the following possibilities for installation: 
> 
> 1) normal CUPS user, recommended, this is what comes by default (unless you do 
> something stupid such as USE="-*")
> net-print/cups
> net-print/cups-filters[foomatic]
> 
> 2) NOT recommended, dead code, unmaintained: 
> net-print/cups
> net-print/cups-filters[-foomatic]
> net-print/foomatic-filters
> 
> 3) for the stone age people out there, NOT recommended, dead code, 
> unmaintained:
> any other printing system, e.g. lprng
> net-print/foomatic-filters
> 
> So, what's wrong in your case? No idea, but after longish not-updating things 
> do get hard for emerge to unravel. My recommendation is, since foomatic-
> filters and cups-filters are only needed for printing and emerge runs fine 
> without them, force-remove both and let emerge figure out the right package 
> set from scratch.  
> 
> [This basically works with any blocker as a last resort, but can be *very* 
> dangerous for packages that are needed by the core system. You definitely 
> don't want to remove gcc or glibc this way, for example. :)]
> 
> emerge -aC net-print/cups-filters net-print/foomatic-filters
> emerge -uDNavt --backtrack=100 world
> 
> Cheers, 
> Andreas


Good post!

For Alan Mackenzie's benefit, a little back story:

The whole topic of printing is a mess, no single mere mortal can wrap
their wits around it.

Long long ago a printer was a piece of hardware you plugged into a
serial or parallel port, the kernel found it and you were good to go.
Whoopee!

Because more than one user could use the printer and this causes
conflicts, print servers were written: the server controlled the printer
hardware and you submitted your print job to the server, and that took
care of all the messy parts. To do it over the network was just as easy,
modify the print server to also listen on a network port.

This server was the classic "lp" suite of tools.

Many years ago, HP developed a fancy printing language for their laser
printers called PostScript[1]. Think of it as a giant image format, it
doesn't describe what the printed page looks like, it really is simple
code that tells the printer how to print the page, including graphics
and such. And so the era of complicated drivers was begun.

These laser printers needed gobs of memory and big cpus to deal with
PostScript, in the 386 era it was common to have a printer much more
powerful than your computer.

Enter other vendors and Windows. Just like with sound cards, vendors
wrote their own drivers adding "features" done in software. This makes
sense is you can't get PostScript to do double-sided printing or scale
down so two pages fit on one page, doesn't make so much sense if you
just want to avoid paying HP a PostScript license.

After a while, HP got around to updating PostScript (or maybe it was
Apple's code all long - I forget...) and called it PCL (Printer Control
Language), needing new drivers.

meanwhile, printers shifted over to USB away from parallel ports  and
this needed new drivers. Plus there's two way to do it: do the USB part
of the printing in userspace and only use the kernel for regular USB
work, or put the whole thing in the kernel. Needing more drivers. last I
looked, there were still some serious issues with the options to have it
all in the kernel.

On the print server side, the devs were getting real busy. We had
classic lp, then came lprng, then something else I forget and finally an
upstart crowd wrote CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), eventually
bought by Apple. Ironically, there's now nothing common about it and
it's for iOS not Unix. Such is life. With the latest major version
update Apple ripped out all the bits we find so useful and still declare
the software is "for Unix".

Firms like Canon had developed big expensive network-enabled stand-alone
printers. You'd think this is as easy as fitting an embedded OS with a
print server to replace a dedicated PC with USB/parallel ports... I've
had to deal with junk that despite being branded PostScript would only
work with it's own Windows drivers. 50 Linux users of all sorts and
different distros could not get this bitch to work.

Enter the age of network printing protocols. We have IPP running on port
631, something else that is supposedly HTML with huge amounts of extra
printer-specific stuff, JetDirect, and many more things I've long ago
forgotten about. Plus Samba to share a printer the way Windows does it.

Did I mention PPDs? Printer <something> Definition files that describe
how to drive a printer using a standard dscription file. Awesome. Where
do you get these things? Oh I dunno there's foomatic, cups built-ins,
gutenprint, magicfilter and some magic thing from HP called hplip that I
once found worked for an Epson inkjet!

Andreas did a fine job above of describing a map to get around this
driver stuff, including all the many wonderful ways these driver ebuilds
have to block each other to get installed at all.

And I haven't even touched on CUPS' "feature" that requires you to
delete and re-add back all your printers after any remerge. Ask Dale
about this, he's the resident expert and he's even figured out how to
get hplip to work.


Are you still here, still listening? Ye gods, this mail is 5x longer
than I thought it would be. I personally have given up on printing
period. I either randomly hit useful looking buttons in KDE's config
widget hoping it will work, or at work I print to PDF, put it on a USB
dongle and wander over to my wife's desk saying please print this on
your windows machine.

I'm not surprised you felt pain dealing with CUPS, I feel your pain - I
really honestly do. But sadly, I can't help you fix it, see previous
para :-)




[1] PostScript is still alive and well today in the form of PDF, and
that's how PDF started out - in it basic form it is essentially
compressed PostScript with hyperlinks!


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?

[Dale]

Alan McKinnon wrote:
> And I haven't even touched on CUPS' "feature" that requires you to
> delete and re-add back all your printers after any remerge. Ask Dale
> about this, he's the resident expert and he's even figured out how to
> get hplip to work.

Every time I upgrade CUPS or hplip, I go to a Konsole and type in
hp-setup as root.  A window pops up and I just set the printer up again,
it's GUI based.  So far, that has worked.  Don't jinx it tho.  lol 

If needed, I go to my web browser to CUPS and delete the printer first. 

Since I ran out of ink, I haven't printed in a while however, the same
works on my brothers puter and he runs Kubuntu.  Well, was my brothers
anyway.  :/

Dale

:-)  :-)

-- 
I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!

Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?

[Daniel Frey]

On 06/08/2014 03:08 PM, Dale wrote:
> 
> Every time I upgrade CUPS or hplip, I go to a Konsole and type in
> hp-setup as root.  A window pops up and I just set the printer up again,
> it's GUI based.  So far, that has worked.  Don't jinx it tho.  lol 

Yep, same here. I read a lot of horror stories getting it to work, and
when I first installed hplip it didn't do anything until I googled and
found I had to run hp-setup with elevated privileges. I haven't had any
issues printing - hplip prints great with my CP1025nw.

> 
> If needed, I go to my web browser to CUPS and delete the printer first. 

I hate updating cups and hplip, I've masked newer versions and will only
update when I really have to. (Like another package needing a new
version of something-or-other.)

> 
> Since I ran out of ink, I haven't printed in a while however, the same
> works on my brothers puter and he runs Kubuntu.  Well, was my brothers
> anyway.  :/

I'm using hplip on Ubuntu, Mint, and Gentoo.

Dan

Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?

[Alan McKinnon]

On 09/06/2014 00:08, Dale wrote:
> Alan McKinnon wrote:
>> And I haven't even touched on CUPS' "feature" that requires you to
>> delete and re-add back all your printers after any remerge. Ask Dale
>> about this, he's the resident expert and he's even figured out how to
>> get hplip to work.
> 
> Every time I upgrade CUPS or hplip, I go to a Konsole and type in
> hp-setup as root.  A window pops up and I just set the printer up again,
> it's GUI based.  So far, that has worked.  Don't jinx it tho.  lol


printing? printing? who mentioned printing?

sure wasn't me, I remember all too well what happened that time we
mentioned HAL and you were around.... that was not good and none of us
want *that* again

so we are very careful in what we say to keep the jinx monster away :-)


You've been quite lately though, what happened? Surely it can't be that
Gentoo finally stopped messing with you and started behaving itself?


hahahaha <Alan made a funny>




-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?

[Frank Steinmetzger]

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On Sun, Jun 08, 2014 at 05:08:11PM -0500, Dale wrote:

> Every time I upgrade CUPS or hplip, I go to a Konsole and type in
> hp-setup as root.  A window pops up and I just set the printer up again,
> it's GUI based.  So far, that has worked.  Don't jinx it tho.  lol
>
> If needed, I go to my web browser to CUPS and delete the printer first.

I, too, have an HP printer (Laserjet 1000 from 2004, still with the original
toner). Back in the days printing worked simply with cups and foo2zjs. Then
along came hplip which drives me nuts nowadays:

It’s another icon in the tray for a function that I use once in a blue moon.

It needs some kind of binary plugin, but I don’t think it’s the printer
firmware, because hplip already installs that into /usr/share/.... Recently
I had to download the plugin manually b/c a) it must be the same version as
hplip and there was an hplip upgrade, and b) my PC cannot get online right
now. The plugin’s URL was very generic, with no indication about a specific
printer model.

Then, nowadays, the system python is python 3. If that is the case, then the
plugin installer will fail because it is a shellscript with an embedded tar
which contains a python 2 script. And the GUI gives no clue to that cause of
failure.
--
Gruß | Greetings | Qapla’
Please do not share anything from, with or about me on any social network.

“I want to be free!” said the string puppet and cut its strings.

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Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Alan.

On Sun, Jun 08, 2014 at 11:47:32PM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> For Alan Mackenzie's benefit, a little back story:

> The whole topic of printing is a mess, no single mere mortal can wrap
> their wits around it.

> Long long ago a printer was a piece of hardware you plugged into a
> serial or parallel port, the kernel found it and you were good to go.
> Whoopee!

> Because more than one user could use the printer and this causes
> conflicts, print servers were written: the server controlled the printer
> hardware and you submitted your print job to the server, and that took
> care of all the messy parts. To do it over the network was just as easy,
> modify the print server to also listen on a network port.

> This server was the classic "lp" suite of tools.

> Many years ago, HP developed a fancy printing language for their laser
> printers called PostScript[1].

Wasn't it Adobe?

> Think of it as a giant image format, it doesn't describe what the
> printed page looks like, it really is simple code that tells the
> printer how to print the page, including graphics and such. And so the
> era of complicated drivers was begun.

> These laser printers needed gobs of memory and big cpus to deal with
> PostScript, in the 386 era it was common to have a printer much more
> powerful than your computer.

> Enter other vendors and Windows. Just like with sound cards, vendors
> wrote their own drivers adding "features" done in software. This makes
> sense if you can't get PostScript to do double-sided printing or scale
> down so two pages fit on one page, doesn't make so much sense if you
> just want to avoid paying HP a PostScript license.

> After a while, HP got around to updating PostScript (or maybe it was
> Apple's code all long - I forget...) and called it PCL (Printer Control
> Language), needing new drivers.

> meanwhile, printers shifted over to USB away from parallel ports  and
> this needed new drivers. Plus there's two way to do it: do the USB part
> of the printing in userspace and only use the kernel for regular USB
> work, or put the whole thing in the kernel. Needing more drivers. last I
> looked, there were still some serious issues with the options to have it
> all in the kernel.

This is the CONFIG_USB_PRINTER, which if I remember correctly, must be
either on or off depending on other things you might have configured.  I
have been confused about this in the past.  Incidentally, my printer has
a parallel port which was still in use until I got my new box in 2009.

> On the print server side, the devs were getting real busy. We had
> classic lp, then came lprng, then something else I forget and finally an
> upstart crowd wrote CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), eventually
> bought by Apple. Ironically, there's now nothing common about it and
> it's for iOS not Unix. Such is life. With the latest major version
> update Apple ripped out all the bits we find so useful and still declare
> the software is "for Unix".

I wasn't aware of that.  This is a variant of MS's "Embrace, extend" and
shows the dangers inherent in allowing commercial firms like Apple (or
Redhat?) to take control of infrastructure bits of the system.  I used
lprng until ~2 years ago, when libreoffice stopped supporting classical
print spoolers.  lprng just worked, unlike all the kerfuffle with cups.

> Firms like Canon had developed big expensive network-enabled stand-alone
> printers. You'd think this is as easy as fitting an embedded OS with a
> print server to replace a dedicated PC with USB/parallel ports... I've
> had to deal with junk that despite being branded PostScript would only
> work with it's own Windows drivers. 50 Linux users of all sorts and
> different distros could not get this bitch to work.

Presumably, there'll be a PostScript validation suite which probably
costs much more than the printer you wanted to validate.

> Enter the age of network printing protocols. We have IPP running on port
> 631, something else that is supposedly HTML with huge amounts of extra
> printer-specific stuff, JetDirect, and many more things I've long ago
> forgotten about. Plus Samba to share a printer the way Windows does it.

Yes.  Lots of complication, with no benefit for users like me.  :-(

> Did I mention PPDs? Printer <something> Definition files that describe
> how to drive a printer using a standard dscription file. Awesome. Where
> do you get these things? Oh I dunno there's foomatic, cups built-ins,
> gutenprint, magicfilter and some magic thing from HP called hplip that I
> once found worked for an Epson inkjet!

> Andreas did a fine job above of describing a map to get around this
> driver stuff, including all the many wonderful ways these driver ebuilds
> have to block each other to get installed at all.

Indeed.

> And I haven't even touched on CUPS' "feature" that requires you to
> delete and re-add back all your printers after any remerge. Ask Dale
> about this, he's the resident expert and he's even figured out how to
> get hplip to work.

I don't seem to need hplip at the moment.  My emerge of cups last night
(to 1.7.1) didn't need me to reinstall my printer.

> Are you still here, still listening? Ye gods, this mail is 5x longer
> than I thought it would be. I personally have given up on printing
> period. I either randomly hit useful looking buttons in KDE's config
> widget hoping it will work, or at work I print to PDF, put it on a USB
> dongle and wander over to my wife's desk saying please print this on
> your windows machine.

I don't blame you.  Why must things be this complicated?

> I'm not surprised you felt pain dealing with CUPS, I feel your pain - I
> really honestly do. But sadly, I can't help you fix it, see previous
> para :-)

My main problem was with emerge.  The fact that various printing packages
were blocking eachother was only apparent in the 147k line debug output,
not in the normal messages printed to stdout/stderr.

> [1] PostScript is still alive and well today in the form of PDF, and
> that's how PDF started out - in it basic form it is essentially
> compressed PostScript with hyperlinks!

Have a good day!

> -- 
> Alan McKinnon
> alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?

[Alan McKinnon]

On 09/06/2014 12:28, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> Hi, Alan.
> 
> On Sun, Jun 08, 2014 at 11:47:32PM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>> For Alan Mackenzie's benefit, a little back story:

[...]

>> Many years ago, HP developed a fancy printing language for their laser
>> printers called PostScript[1].
> 
> Wasn't it Adobe?

Yes, I believe you are right. this old brain isn;t what it used to be

[...]

>> meanwhile, printers shifted over to USB away from parallel ports  and
>> this needed new drivers. Plus there's two way to do it: do the USB part
>> of the printing in userspace and only use the kernel for regular USB
>> work, or put the whole thing in the kernel. Needing more drivers. last I
>> looked, there were still some serious issues with the options to have it
>> all in the kernel.
> 
> This is the CONFIG_USB_PRINTER, which if I remember correctly, must be
> either on or off depending on other things you might have configured.  I
> have been confused about this in the past.  Incidentally, my printer has
> a parallel port which was still in use until I got my new box in 2009.

That's the one. Very very confusing at the time and I recall it clearly
- the kernel config help text was as far from helpful as one can get.
Lucky for me, I found a howto by someone who understood and that sorted
it for me.

[...]

>> And I haven't even touched on CUPS' "feature" that requires you to
>> delete and re-add back all your printers after any remerge. Ask Dale
>> about this, he's the resident expert and he's even figured out how to
>> get hplip to work.
> 
> I don't seem to need hplip at the moment.  My emerge of cups last night
> (to 1.7.1) didn't need me to reinstall my printer.

As I understand it hplip installs drivers for HP printers and is able to
figure out what you have and which driver you need. I doubt it is a
dependency of anything, it looks more like something you install if you
want it and need it

[...]


> My main problem was with emerge.  The fact that various printing packages
> were blocking eachother was only apparent in the 147k line debug output,
> not in the normal messages printed to stdout/stderr.

You have the bad luck to have picked exactly the wrong time to update a
Gentoo box after a long time away. A *lot* has happened in the tree over
the past several months, especially sub-slots that have now come into
their own.

Sub-slots are actually a good idea, and time will tell if the
implementation is also a good idea. There's many benefits, not least of
which is that every huge package your have like libreoffice probably
doesn't need updating every time a line of code changes in icu. Not
needing @preserved-rebuild is a small bonus, not something I care much
about. And I don't mind running perl-cleaner once a year with a major
version perl upgrade. I *do* mind forgetting to run perl-cleaner and
being caught out - sub-slots help with that.

Unfortunately portage has always been a tad obtuse with it's output, and
leans heavy towards a fatal design flaw to the user - too much of the
internal implementation shows up in the output wording. Recent !arch
version deal with this, that "no parents that aren't satisfied in this
slot" message is gone (no-one ever knew what that meant) and is replaced
with clever output that prints version numbers and operators (<, >= and
so on) in colour with neat carat symbols "^" below, that point to what
is important.

I strongly recommend you set portage to use ~arch, it is good code these
days and while it doesn't remove the complexity of the tree, it does
make a much better job of telling you what is going on and what it needs
from you to proceed.


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?

[J. Roeleveld]

>Are you still here, still listening? Ye gods, this mail is 5x longer
>than I thought it would be. I personally have given up on printing
>period. I either randomly hit useful looking buttons in KDE's config
>widget hoping it will work, or at work I print to PDF, put it on a USB
>dongle and wander over to my wife's desk saying please print this on
>your windows machine.

I usually get printing working from Linux before I get it working on MS Windows.
Then again. Some printers accept a USB stick with PDFs and can print them natively. Those aren't too expensive either. 

--
Joost

-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

Re: [gentoo-user] What's with foomatic-filters and cups-filters?

[Alan Mackenzie]

Good morning, Andreas!

On Sun, Jun 08, 2014 at 07:15:36PM +0200, Andreas K. Huettel wrote:
> Am Sonntag, 8. Juni 2014, 17:48:09 schrieb Alan Mackenzie:
> > .   What is all this trying to tell me?  I've tried for over an hour to
> > make sense of it, but my eyes just glaze over.  My best guess is that
> > cups-filters and foomatic-filters are packages which can't be installed
> > together.  But I _need_ foomatic-filters - otherwise my printer doesn't
> > print.  Or do I?  cups-filters seems to be needed by cups.

> > What _are_ cups-filters and foomatic-filters?  emerge -s is little help
> > here.  Why do I need both of them?

> * cups-filters is a former part of cups that provides file format conversions 
> (among other things). Basically it (also) makes sure that everything is 
> internally converted to PDF. It's not part of CUPS (as maintained by Apple) 
> anymore, but hard-required by CUPS on Linux (and maintained by the Linux 
> Foundation). 

> * foomatic-filters is a set of printer drivers, basically. 

> * Some time ago the cups-filters maintainers took over maintainership of the 
> foomatic-filters part for CUPS as well, and integrated it cleanly into cups-
> filters. That's the reason for the blocker; recent cups-filters contain the 
> newest foomatic code available. The former separate foomatic-filters package 
> is now unmaintained.

Thanks!  That was brilliantly clear and informative.

> So, we have the following possibilities for installation: 

> 1) normal CUPS user, recommended, this is what comes by default (unless you do 
> something stupid such as USE="-*")
> net-print/cups
> net-print/cups-filters[foomatic]

This is what I now have.

> 2) NOT recommended, dead code, unmaintained: 
> net-print/cups
> net-print/cups-filters[-foomatic]
> net-print/foomatic-filters

> 3) for the stone age people out there, NOT recommended, dead code, 
> unmaintained:
> any other printing system, e.g. lprng
> net-print/foomatic-filters

I had lprng when I first installed Gentoo (2010).  It just worked (with
apsfilter(?s) rather than foomatic).  Was forced, with regret, to switch
to cups when libreoffice stopped supporting traditional print spoolers.

> So, what's wrong in your case? No idea, but after longish not-updating things 
> do get hard for emerge to unravel. My recommendation is, since foomatic-
> filters and cups-filters are only needed for printing and emerge runs fine 
> without them, force-remove both and let emerge figure out the right package 
> set from scratch.  

This worked!  I now have printing.

> [This basically works with any blocker as a last resort, but can be *very* 
> dangerous for packages that are needed by the core system. You definitely 
> don't want to remove gcc or glibc this way, for example. :)]

> emerge -aC net-print/cups-filters net-print/foomatic-filters
> emerge -uDNavt --backtrack=100 world

I've not plucked up the courage for the world emerge, yet.

But the original bug was that I had to get --debug output from emerge to
see that it was the foomatic/cups stuff that was clashing.  This wasn't
contained in the normal, somewhat obscure, emerge error messages.

> Cheers, 
> Andreas

> -- 
> Andreas K. Huettel
> Gentoo Linux developer (council, kde)
> dilfridge@gentoo.org
> http://www.akhuettel.de/

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).