Cups printer detection in pre-built packages

J.R. Oldroyd fbsd at opal.com
Thu Apr 13 14:49:39 CDT 2006


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.

	-jr



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