Talk:CUPS/Proposed baseline

Objections and review for the proposed baseline revision should go here. Comments in the sections should be in the format:

 ;

Comments on the article.

Section: Overview
Several clarifications should be considered when it comes to this article:
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 * "CUPS provides a standard interface to allow print jobs to be sent to printers." - should we clarify what "standard interface" means?
 * "Previously, it was difficult to find a solution that was standardised that would allow for the numerous printers that are on the market that use their own printer languages and formats." what were the other solutions that we are comparing against? Isn't this merely restricted to Unixes?
 * "With CUPS, it is far easier for printer manufacturers and printer driver developers to create drivers that work natively on the print server." - what are we comparing against?
 * "As the processing is done on the server, it is also far easier to allow for network based printing than it was previously with other Unix printing systems." The processing is done on the server for lpd, correct? Is it more accurate to say that it can filter different types of data on the server? Again, what are we comparing against? If we could clarify this it would make this text far more accurate.

Subsection: Scheduler
Looks accurate.

Subsection: Filter system
Looks accurate.
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Subsection: Backends
Brief, but accurate.
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Section: Compatibility
Accurate.
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Section: User Interface tools
The overview is accurate. However, is it complete? Are these all the UI tools that can be used with CUPS?
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Subsection: KDE
Recommend that this be reviewed for accuracy by KDE experts. Suggest contacting developers of KDE-print to review this section, also suggest sending a request for help on the KDE mailing list.
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Subection: Mandrake Linux
Recommend that this be reviewed for accuracy by Mandrake Linux experts. Suggest sending a request for help to a Mandrake Linux mailing list. This could be expanded, may not be complete. Is the screenshot a fair representation of Mandrake's CUPS GUI offering?
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Red Hat/Fedora
Seems complete to me. I personally use the RedHat GUI on my Fedora Core 2 machine. Fedora Core 3 has been released, so don't know if this has been changed. The Eric Raymond quote is accurate.
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ESP Print Pro
I took this directly from ESP website. Recommend review and expansion.
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CUPS web-based administration interface
Accurate, but very brief. Can this be expanded?
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Vulnerabilities
Accurate, but incomplete. See :
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 * During a source code audit, Chris Evans discovered a number of integer overflow bugs that affect xpdf. CUPS contains a copy of the xpdf code used for parsing PDF files and is therefore affected by these bugs.  An attacker who has the ability to send a malicious PDF file to a printer could cause

CUPS to crash or possibly execute arbitrary code. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CAN-2004-0888 to this issue.
 * When set up to print to a shared printer via Samba, CUPS would authenticate with that shared printer using a username and password. By default, the username and password used to connect to the Samba share is written into the error log file.  A local user who is able to read the error log file could collect these usernames and passwords.  The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CAN-2004-0923 to this issue.
 * When set up to print to a shared printer via Samba, CUPS would authenticate with that shared printer using a username and password. By default, the username and password used to connect to the Samba share is written into the error log file.  A local user who is able to read the error log file could collect these usernames and passwords.  The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CAN-2004-0923 to this issue.

A list of vulnerabilities is likely going to all be incomplete. I'd suggest not listing them (rather where to find them), especially in a document one would consider stable.
 * Demi T/C
 * Good point. Maybe we could incorporat this into the text somehow? - Ta bu shi da yu 04:21, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Neutrality
I see no problems with Neutrality. However, I am the original author of this article, and therefore biased. However, I have tried to present a balanced view of CUPS.
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Style and structure
The article structure is written using a top-down structure. It gives general information at the start of the article and then becomes more specific. The lead section gives a very brief overview that shows the salient points that the article covers in a way that attempts to "grab" the casual reader. The overview section attempts to give a highlevel overview of the architecture of CUPS and how the components fits together. Further sections are "Compatibility", which is in it's own section as this is a specific and important feature of CUPS; "User Interface Tools", which is important as a few user interfaces have been created for different systems.
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The lead section should be OK, as this went through several revision whilst on FAC.

The "Overview" section is problematic, however. It starts off well, with a brief summary of why CUPS is made the way it is made, and a brief overview of how it works. The entire scheduler section needs a rewrite as it's unnecessarily confusing. I wrote it, but it's confusing how different modules link to each other. It could do with another diagram to make this clearer. The filter system is good, however I have to question my decision to include the MIME lines from the config file into the article. Does this make things clearer? If not, then should these be removed and the section rewritten? I debated whether these should be removed when I submitted the article to FAC.

The "Compatibility" section is accurate. However, is it detailed enough? Is it well written?

The "User Interface tools" section needs review. The different user interface tools need to be expanded and rewritten to be better prose. More information about how the systems work would be good. Not sure if there should be a seperate section for each type of user interface and platform.

Completeness
No mention of OS X. A big problem!
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Referencing and sources
The reference section is complete, however inline references leave much to be desired. A footnoting system needs to be setup, or (as my preferred system is), use (author, date), or (site, date). This is sadly lacking in this revision.
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