For the last few weeks I’ve been working on an experimental new print spooler called printerd. It was designed in collaboration with Richard Hughes and it aims to be a modern print spooler for Linux.
It is a polkit-enabled D-Bus system service, written using the GLib object system. Although modelled on concepts from IPP (Internet Printing Protocol), printerd is not in itself an IPP server. Its only interface is D-Bus, although the aim is to be able to implement an IPP server on top of the D-Bus API as a separate process. Having a D-Bus interface means that applications wanting to print automatically get to use printerd asynchronously.
As a design decision, the range of input formats accepted by printerd will be very limited: essentially only PDF. The existing CUPS drivers and backends will be compatible with printerd.
There isn’t much written yet aside from the basic framework and a very simple command line tool.
Feel free to take a look around: http://github.com/hughsie/printerd
(more…)