"cups" interface finalization

Bug #2020808 reported by Till Kamppeter
26
This bug affects 3 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
snapd
Triaged
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

I hope this is the right platform to report bugs in upstream snapd. If not, please tell me which is the correct one.

The "cups" interface for application Snaps to plug in order to safely print via CUPS without the snapped application being able to manipulate the print queues is working so far and several application Snaps use it already.

The only point where the "cups" interface still needs to get finalized is the fact that it uses a workaround to auto-install the required CUPS Snap, the Snap using "cups" has to install it as a "default-provider", using some extra blob in the snapcraft.yaml. See the documentation:

https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/the-cups-interface/

A year ago Michael Vogt told me that this will get integrated in snapd so that when snapping an application which prints one only needs to plug "cups" and snapd will take care of the auto-installation.

Later on, after the Nov 2022 Engineering Sprint we had a video meeting and came to the conclusion that we cannot forcefully install the CUPS Snap when installing a Snap of an application which prints (and therefore plugs "cups") but need to ask the user. This should be done as on a smartphone, when the CUPS Snap is not installed (yet) and the user tries to print, ask for installing the CUPS Snap ... Similar also for any other external service an application could need ...

On the April 2023 Engineering Sprint I met Michael Vogt again and he recommended to me to report a bug, which I am doing now.

Otherwise we have to live with the workaround ...

Revision history for this message
Michael Vogt (mvo) wrote :

Thanks for your bugreport.

Just wanted to make a short comment on the timelines above - unfortunately this request competes with other feature requests for snapd. So while we discussed it and I put it on our TODO list actually implementing it did not quite make the cut for the features to work on. I'm sorry about that and understand your frustration. But sadly the reality is that we are a small team with many responsibilities so not everyone can be done.

Changed in snapd:
status: New → Triaged
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