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In alt.os.linux.slackware, Dominik L.. Borkowski dared to utter,
> It's a life saver over what the printing situation was 5-10 years ago. Maybe
> you don't remember the lpd/printcap hell, or managing printers between
> different operating systems.

This isn't 5-10 years ago. All printing systems in use today have
matured.

> I don't see big&fat lprng support section in the official samba howto. Am I
> missing something?

The presence of documentation for a mostly unrelated tool in another
tool's documentation does not necessarily mean that the former is well
supported in the latter. Indeed, the documentation's presence may well
be caused by difficulty in supporting the former. By correlation, you
cannot by this fact say one product is more supported than another in a
third party application. samba was doing print sharing before there was
CUPS and LPRng was pretty much you're only option. Things worked just
as good then in that regaurd as they do now.

> i see. so having one utility to print, another one to check printer status
> is not enough?

No, but having a GUI config tool to add printers, manage jobs, shut
printers offline and crap like that does.

> a printing sytem is too much? which exact things are done half-assed?

Printers that just randomnly go offline and have to be turned back on.
Jobs that get dropped into the bit bucket without warning. This may
have improved since the last time I tried CUPS 1-2 years back.

> Sure, except this allowes an admin to deploy such solution on hundreds of
> workstations with one single entry in a netlogon script.

That's a samba thing, not a CUPS thing. It's independent of the backend
system that handles print jobs. I've done the same thing with hylafax
to pipe postscript print documents from windows computers to a process
that faxes that document out to a number it greps from the postscript
file. All that should be needed for this is Samba and Ghostscript.

>> Hmmm... why don't you put "lprng pdf creation" without the quotes into
>> google and tell it you're feeling lucky? LPRng can do the same thing
>> with minimal configuration.
>
> The irony. Go ahead and do it. The first link describes something without
> ever using lprng.

Nor does it use CUPS. To quote the article,

the technique used to print to the PDF service can be used to print
to any other printer service shared by Samba or Windows, so it is good
information to cover.

The article mentions using LPRng tools for setting up linux printing
from a client.

> If you haven't noticed yet, yes, I'm advocating cups. However, at least I
> have the decency not to smear the other product [lprng].

If you haven't noticed yet, yes, I'm advocating LPRng, and you have
been smearing LPRng.

It's a life saver over what the printing situation was 5-10 years ago.

By implication you are calling LPRng antiquated and not as capable of
handling the job of printing as CUPS. Now we can debate about this all
we want for as long as we want, but the fact is, LPRng works, it
doesn't crash, support for it is for now more readily available, and
it's code base is more mature. In comparison, CUPS has crashed on me
many times (just up and died with no helpful data written to syslog)
and buggy (randomly stops spooling jobs to the printer).

That's just ME. As always, YMMV.

- --
It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise,
Than for a man to hear the song of fools.
Ecclesiastes 7:5
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