On Thu, 2007-03-01 at 10:04 +0100, Ludwig Nussel wrote:
JP Rosevear wrote:
1) Detecting a local USB printer when plugged into the machine and prompting the user to configure it or automatically selecting a driver and configuring the printer [...] 2) Not needing root to configure a printer
Why do printers need a special case? It's just some piece of hardware that can be plugged in at run time. Ideally there is a (default) driver so it's possible to configure the hardware automatically in the background and the user won't notice. If you need any interactive input (ie YaST) to configure a device you need to authenticate[1] as root. That barrier does not only avoid accidential privilege escalation, it also prevents users from thoughtlessly doing something that can harm the system. You need to authenticate only if you plug in the hardware the first time anyways. One likely does not plug in a different printer, scanner, tv card etc every day.
They don't need to be a special case, I suggested a couple of ways we could generalize this for hardware. One good use case we've seen with customers is that they don't want to give out the root password because that would enable users to do anything they want like update packages.
3) Detecting when a printer is connected/disconnected and offering visual feedback via a notification area icon, or some other ui feedback
There should be no special case for printers. You want that for any hardware. Like e.g. a well known popuplar OS tells you "the XYZ device is ready to use now" (or whatever the exact wording is). In case of a printers I'd expect tools like kprinter to already visually indicate if a queue is disabled which is unrelated to whether the hardware is actually available.
I'm talking of specialized device info, not simple existence. Yes, you can poll for the status, but a straight forward message on the bus allows a number of applications to receive pushes rather than pull the info.
4) Ability to remove printers from cups (even shared printers) when they're unplugged to prevent jobs from accumulating in the queue or being default
I think it's a valid use case to queue a printjob and have it printed when the printer is connected again.
Its a valid use case not to want to do this either, which is why it should be configurable. -JP -- JP Rosevear <jpr@novell.com> Novell, Inc. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org