On 31/01/2020 18:03, Brian Potkin wrote:
On Fri 31 Jan 2020 at 16:36:59 +0100, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote:
Le vendredi, 31 janvier 2020, 14.03:46 h CET Brian Potkin a écrit :
I would say 100% of popular network printers available for users to
purchase in at least the past five years have AirPrint. For our
purposes this is the defining aspect of driverless. A number of devices
is USB only.
Isn't ippusbxd meant to help solving this?
It is and might suit a user if the device supports IPP-over-USB. It is
doable on Debian but not straightforward to set up. Please see
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=909564
and
https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSDriverlessPrinting?action=show&redirect=DriverlessPrinting#shortippusbxd
https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSDriverlessPrinting?action=show&redirect=DriverlessPrinting#ippusbxd
The ability to scan, if it exists, is also lost. I'd be inclined to
guide a user down a driver path.
We have several improvements on that front:
Most important is the new ipp-usb project:
https://github.com/alexpevzner/ipp-usb/
It replaces ippusbxd with a much better architecture concerning the IP
<-> USB conversion. It also does a better job of DNS-SD advertising the
device polling the device's capabilities from the device and generating
the DNS-SD records from this information instead of using hard-coded
DNS-SD records only advertising the printing part, what ippusbxd does.
To easily see the better architecture of ipp-usb you should try using
the web admin interface of the device, usually available under
http://localhost:60000/. With ippusbxd this only works with Firefox and
not with Chrome, and then only barely. With ipp-usb the web interface
works very well with any browser. But printing and scanning is also more
reliable with ipp-usb.
ipp-usb also allows to access the USB device the classic way while not
in operation via IPP-over-USB, without needing to stop the daemon.
ippusbxd blocks the device completely while it is running.
The only part missing in ipp-usb is the auto-detection/auto-start
facility based on UDEV and systemd, but I already asked Alexander to
copy that over from ippusbxd, will probably happen in a few days.
Now scanning via IPP-over-USB (and also through the network on all
devices which support AirPrint) is also driverless, as no driver, aka
model-specific software or data, is needed. The SANE backend "escl" in
SANE 1.0.29 or the separate "airscan" backend
(https://github.com/alexpevzner/sane-airscan/) supports ALL these
devices. Note that "airscan" is more feature-complete and "escl" is more
lightweight (as far as I understood).
So wit all the printing stuff we have already, plus the "escl" and
"airscan" SANE backends and ipp-usb all modern multi-function devices
will print and scan without driver, both via network and USB.
We can ditch HPLIP for our (modern) HP devices and finally can scan on
all modern multi-function devices, not only HP. One nice, easy, and
straight forward solution for everyone.
So I recommend for Debian:
1. replace ippusbxd by ipp-usb (the latter should be debianized ASAP).
2. Update SANE to 1.0.19 and also add the "airscan" backend.
3. Recommend driverless printing and scanning also on multi-function
devices, on both network and USB.
By the way, if you have a cheap multi-function device without
front-panel screen but supporting Wi-Fi (and under Windows using a
proprietary tool to set up Wi-Fi), you can set up such a device thanks
to IPP-over-USB. Simply conect to USB, access the web admin interface to
set up Wi-Fi, disconnect from USB and continue using Wi-Fi.
Till
