Re: [PARPORT] Patch: 2.3.99pre8-lp.c Report Printer Status

From: Gunther Mayer (gunther.mayer@braunschweig.okersurf.de)
Date: Mon May 15 2000 - 13:53:58 EDT

  • Next message: Philip Blundell: "Re: [PARPORT] Patch: 2.3.99pre8-lp.c Report Printer Status"

    Hi Philip,

    Philip Blundell wrote:

    > ...
    > >May 14 14:43:40 linux kernel: lp0 printer-not-ready off-line (0x4f) #
    > >Becoming ready
    >
    > I'm not at all convinced these messages are an improvement on the old ones.
    > Which status in particular was missing that you need?

    Try printing to a port with nothing connected. I just stalls here forever, no
    message
    in SYSLOG or anywhere! This has been annoying for years and is very easy to
    fix, so I did.

    Try switching if off-line (this happens with printers where people walk by...),
    no printing, no messages.

    Second, there was a policy to mask certain bit values in the old code,
    this hides valuable information to judge the condition of your printer
    (and hinders to learn the mapping between printer condition an status
    bit combinations).
    Third, LP_CAREFUL made matter just more complicated, so I removed
    this old cruft (Linus always demands removing cruft instead of adding
    workarounds).
    That was perhaps necessary at some time, when every error
    condition was reported on, not only deltas as now, I assume this could have
    happened
    with pre-IEEE1284 printers. We should make the best of current hardware
    not for the printer museum.

    Of course I would like to get some test results and discussion before
    this goes to the kernel.

    >
    > (You also removed `lp on fire', which is a definite retrograde step.)

    It was renamed to "printer-error" in fact, we should not irritate users about
    the temperature of their printer.

    Thus shall conform to IEEE-1284 Clause 5.10: (nFAULT in Compatibilty mode)
    "Set low by peripheral to indicate that an error occured. The meaning of this
    signal varies from peripheral to peripheral"
    Nothing about fire here, where is this meaning implemented ? :-)

    >
    >
    > >Tim, I think this would be of great value for novice users (first time
    > >printing with linux).
    >
    > Novice users would probably benefit more from some X application to pop up a
    > message box when the printer has a problem. Odds are they aren't going to be
    > looking at the console messages.

    The syslog approach just eliminates the problem without any doubts ! It is very
    dependable and much better then the current state. I admit it helps advanced
    users (e.g. with print servers) the same way as novice users. Of course the
    latter
    will soon learn to look into /var/log/messages and then quickly advance :-)

    Regards, Gunther

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