On Mon, 2014-10-13 at 10:54 +0100, Tim Waugh wrote:
If I understand correctly, cups-bjnp is the backend that discovers the printer. So there's no way to know in advance that it needs to be installed; it would have to be installed by default.
Since we're stuck with having to use closed-source, external, drivers for some hardware, because it's proved impossible to produce an open source one, or it just hasn't happened yet, causing us to have to manually pre-install drivers for special hardware, has anyone thought about a half-way measure?
Simply detecting the presence of such undriven hardware, and notifying the user that some currently unusable hardware is here, and there is no driver installed for it. e.g. It looks like you have a printer, but no driver is available for it.
It might save some of the grief when people want to print, or something else, and are unsure whether the device simply hasn't been found, or that they've done something wrong.
Identifying what hardware is there ought to be an easier task than trying to make drivers from scratch.