Cups printer detection in pre-built packages

[Huw D M Davies]

On Thu, Apr 13, 2006 at 03:49:39PM -0400, J.R. Oldroyd wrote:
> I've been discussing this with the maintainer of the FreeBSD
> wine port.
> 
> Right now, detection of libcups.so is done by the configure
> script at compile time.  This means that pre-built packages
> must either pull in cups as a port dependency in order to
> always enable printer support, or they must do without
> printer support.  Pulling in cups as a dependency is expensive
> for those that don't want it, and so cups is disabled for
> everyone using the FreeBSD binary packages.  You need to
> compile the port if you want cups support.
> 
> Wouldn't a better detection method be to check at runtime
> for the presence of a libcups.so (by means of a dlopen())
> and enable printers if it's found, or disable them if it's
> not found?
> 
> The significance of this would be that a cups dependency
> is required to build the binary package, but the dependency
> is optional at runtime.  And this means that printers would
> always work, even from a binary package install.

Er, we do dlopen cups.  In fact we handle cups just like many of the
other libraries.  You do of course need the cups headers to build Wine
with cups support in the first place, but that's the same for
FreeType, fontconfig, GL etc. 

Huw.
-- 
Huw Davies
huw at codeweavers.com