On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 7:25 AM, Stroller <strol...@stellar.eclipse.co.uk> wrote: > > On 6 September 2011, at 10:12, Alex Schuster wrote: >> ... >>> Just to make things clear, I utterly detest cups, with its arrogance, >>> its wierd, non-standard, and its non-text-based configuration. Surely >>> I'm not going to be faced by the choice of abandoning libreoffice or >>> using cups? >> >> ... >> I never liked CUPS, but then, at least there is some interface >> to configure its options. I don't do much printing anyway, so I can live >> with that. Well, seems I have to. > > There's something about the *idea* of CUPS that I think I disliked at one > time. > > Isn't CUPS really bug and bloaty and horrible? > It has it's own web-interface, which one doesn't seem able to disable - why > can't I just configure text files?
The web interface is on port 631, the port for the Internet Printing Protocol--which operates using HTTP (or something sufficiently like it that you can tell Windows to find a printer at http://yourhostname:631/printer_queue_name) as a baseline. That's why it has a 'web' interface--the IPP folks looked at HTTP, saw that it did much of what they needed, and built on top of it. For giggles...read the HTTP RFC and compare request types like 'PUT' vs 'POST'. HTTP is a *monster* of a protocol. -- :wq
