Mike Bartman wrote:
>> I'm curious as to why this question of drivers and CPUs is part
> of IPP. It seems to me that printer administration is a separate
> issue from printing, and should be dealt with in a separate
> protocol...perhaps one more generic to the question of networked
> machine interoperability. There's no basic reason why printers
> should support distribution and installation of software used to
> ...
The original purpose of IPP was to replace LPD, and LPD handled
a few printer administration issues as well as the mundane print
and cancel job type operations.
Whether or not to address administration issues in IPP has been
an ongoing battle. IMHO *not* providing support for operations
and features needed beyond the printer will hurt IPP in the
long run. Network printing has always been a pain, and
providing a single, vendor-neutral protocol for all printing
stuff is the only way to fix that.
Will printer manufacturers include driver download support in
their products? I doubt it - too many driver revs, languages,
and OS's to fit in limited ROM/flash memory. More likely this
extension will be used by IPP-capable printing systems on desktop
or server machines.
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______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products mike at easysw.com
Printing Software for UNIX http://www.easysw.com