Ticket #411 (closed enhancement: wontfix)
We should honor $PRINTER, including in the GUI if possible
| Reported by: | jdreed | Owned by: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | normal | Milestone: | Karmic Deploy (Canceled) |
| Component: | printing | Keywords: | |
| Cc: | Fixed in version: | ||
| Upstream bug: |
Description
Currently, $PRINTER is honored only on the command line (and the GTK "Print to LPR" backend). We should do something clever such that CUPS knows about $PRINTER, or at the very least we should propagate printer cluster info to CUPS.
Change History
comment:2 Changed 14 years ago by broder
*sigh* I hate printing.
In any case, that last change seems to have been a bit misguided.
CUPS actually respects the PRINTER environment variable, so if you use even the CUPS command-line clients directly, they'll use the correct printer.
Our problem is with Gtk. It's the responsibility of a Gtk application to keep track of what the printer settings were, and restore those the next time a print dialog comes up. evince, for example, is storing its state in ~/.gnome2/evince/print-settings
That's certainly not the whole story, because I don't where Gtk is choosing its printer from initially, but it does mean that it's going to be very hard for us to override the memory of all Gtk applications.
comment:3 Changed 14 years ago by broder
- Status changed from proposed to closed
- Resolution set to wontfix
Based on discussion at release-team, I'm declaring this a WONTFIX.
We shouldn't be in the business of overriding the standard Gtk behavior of re-using the last used print settings, which means our only point of entry is the first time a user prints in a particular application, and it's not worth the effort of catching that one use.
If you use CUPS directly (i.e. from the command line), it'll respect the $PRINTER set in dotfiles. If you're using the GUI, you're on your own.
The new versions of clusterinfo and printing-config in proposed should set this by creating an /etc/cups/lpoptions file with a default printer setting.
People should see if that actually works.
Note that if you've printed from a graphical application, libgnomeprint or whatever it's called will have recorded your settings, and those will override the system defaults. Not sure if we can work around that, or if we should.
Just running cups-lpq with no arguments should be a moderately valid test of if the system default is set correctly.