On Mon, May 24, 2021 at 12:33:45PM +0200, Vitaly Zaitsev via devel wrote:
On 24.05.2021 12:30, Solomon Peachy wrote:
Not only is it possible, it's been done.
For all existing printers in the world? I don't believe.
For all printers? Of course not. But that wasn't what Zdenek wrote.
At least two printer families have working Printer Applications _today_. There is a reasonable plan in place to port several more, and once complete that will encompass the vast majority of the printers still in use.
Meanwhile, stuff that never had a native Linux/CUPS driver still won't work. And stuff that was only ever made available with a proprietary binary driver can be wrapped with legacy CUPS, which itself is a "printer application".
Printing has always been an awful, awful mess, and the fact it works as well as it does is a testatment to the thankless efforts of the OpenPrinting folks (and their predecessors).
Indeed, these days, it's a rare (new-ish) printer that doesn't JusWork(tm). The Printer Application model is attempting to bring the older/niche models into the same "driverless" paradigm. This is a VeryGoodThing(tm), as it means printing will automagically JustWork(tm) for just about everyone -- Linux, Android, iOS, MacOS, and even Windows!
We're even going to (finally!) be getting sane color profile management out of the box!
- Solomon