Does anyone know what should I be looking for when CUPS web interface tells me "Color Manager: no profiles specified in PPD"?

Nevermind, it doesn't seem to be relevant to my printing issue

Why do all printers have to be some black magic

@sebasth To quote Russ Allbery: "Printers are unreliable contraptions sent from the depths of hell to torture sysadmins".

@JennyD Possible silver lining is that printers keep the people maintaining them in employment

@sebasth True. At the current client, I am more or less in charge of one printer only; the rest are owned by $OTHERDEPARTMENT.

this makes me happy because our one printer has very little use

@JennyD What does being in charge of a printer entail? Unjamming it? Something else?

My limited experience of printer software has been that it is quite stable if you don't mess with it. But I've only used CUPS for the longest time.

@FaheemMitha Unjamming, fixing any CUPS problems that may occur. That one printer is mainly used from Linux workstations. There are a couple of Windows users but since I'm generally completely useless when it comes to windows problems, my coworker handles those.

@JennyD So CUPS problems come up? My impression of printers in general is that they jam fairly easily.

But CUPS is relatively well-behaving. Though it does have a weird default on Debian (at least) where if there is an error it simply switches off the printer at the software side Which isn't helpful.

:4724917 If there's a CUPS problem it's usually that something wasn't properly installed on a new workstation to start with, or some user has messed their own settings up, which has happened once or twice in the last year.

@FaheemMitha Yeah, and it feels like the messages presented are not always relevant to the issue at hand

Like my earlier issue, turned out a problematic picture in a pdf (possibly not enough ram on printer). That color manager message didn't seem to be relevant.

Also for some reason if I print from Firefox I have to press ready-button on printer for anything to be printed, which I find somewhat odd (still no other than that color manager -message; which looks like to be there all the time)

and if I use firefox pdf viewer to print it renders the font incorrectly, but that I suspect to be an issue in ff pdf viewer.

@sebasth What color manager message?

@sebasth Oh. I've never seen that one. Is that a color printer thing? Because I don't have a color printer. I did once - that was a long time ago.

@FaheemMitha An old B/W LaserJet

@sebasth If you look at the PPD, does it say ColorDevice: True or False?

same on client as well (printer is connected to another machine)

@sebasth So the Google hits for that weren't helpful?

@FaheemMitha not really, as I am not even certain if the error message is relevant

(seems to be there even when there seems to be no issues in printing)

@sebasth Yes, CUPS is a bit of a mess. Like many free software projects, unfortunately.

I remember digging into OpenSSH many years ago and finding all kinds of weirdnesses. But the mailing list (user or devel, I can't remember, probably devel), could not have been less interested.

I suppose I should have tried to work up a proper error report, but probably didn't. I think I didn't really understand what I was seeing.

@FaheemMitha Yeah, often enough fluency in the programming language the software is written is extremely helpful

The problem with programs like OpenSSH is that the vast majority use it in default settings, so many of the options might be buggy, and it could easily be overlooked.

(too many times I've been reading source code since the documentation doesn't address the exact issue/question I have)

@sebasth For something like OpenSSH, it would need more than the programming language.

@FaheemMitha at least I find quite many older projects written in C to be somewhat difficult to follow sometimes

@sebasth OpenSSH is probably quite complex. Quite aside from considerations of source code reading.

I don't think that is uncommon for older and largish free software projects.

It could easily take months of work to understand properly what is doing on enough to submit a patch. Or even a good bug report.

@FaheemMitha well designed software ideally abstracts the complexity, so lower level complexity should not leak into higher abstraction levels

@sebasth Possibly. I never made a serious attempt to investigate OpenSSH. Spending time on software code bases is a real time suck.

@FaheemMitha OpenSSH uses lots of complex macros too which doesn’t help

@StephenKitt Are you familiar with it?

And much of the time the developers are not interested in helping people out. The OpenSSH people were more than averagely unfriendly, as I recall. Though it's been a while.

@FaheemMitha a little

I also remember really struggling with Boost Python and related Boost libraries once upon a time. They were even more so.

@FaheemMitha for a long time there was only a single overworked developer

Or maybe about the same. It's been a while. Also, Django.

@StephenKitt Oh. I had the impression there were more people. I don't see how one person is possible.

@FaheemMitha at least Django has good documentation ;-)

@StephenKitt Well, I know who to ask if and when I encounter weird OpenSSH behavior. :-)

@StephenKitt Just another example of unfriendliness.

This project actually made it hard to report bugs. At least at the time i was using it.

@FaheemMitha ?

The RM said it was to reduce low quality bug reports. The directions were embedded deep inside some documentation.

@StephenKitt I found the Django Project unfriendly, that's all I meant to say.

Of course, it's, again, been a while.

This was like over 10 years ago.

@FaheemMitha oh, right, I’ve never interacted with them

I see the Django Debian packages have been reorganized. There used to be only one package, I think.

@StephenKitt I tried to get help. On IRC, and possibly also the MLs. Not a great experience.

I didn't have a background in web development, and they weren't very nice about it.

Though web programming seems like an odd thing to get snobbish about.

@StephenKitt I was wondering what web application frameworks are good in your opinion? any language.

@Tim I like Django (Python) and Spring MVC (Java), but I’m old-school

I’ve been meaning to look into reactive frameworks in more detail but I do very little web development nowadays

What particular reactive frameworks are you meaning to look into? Are Angular and React a reactive framework?

@Tim I’m meaning to look into Vert.x (I have colleagues who work on the project)

Angular and React are more UI oriented as I understand it, they don’t cover the server side of things, but being recent JS frameworks I imagine they’re largely event-oriented and reactive

@FaheemMitha The OpenSSH (and OpenBSD) people are friendly enough if you speak their language. This does include giving proper bug reports with easy to reproduce examples etc. That team is a bit thinly stretched over too much to do at times it seems, so I can kinda understand if they are quick to dismiss enquires of a more general nature.

I'd be seriously surprised if there was code rot in OpenSSH though. It's used in so many places and in so many different ways, so I'd assume that most of its features sees use on a regular basis.

@StephenKitt I was wondering what web service libraries are good in your opinion? in any language.

@FaheemMitha oh wait I was getting mixed up with OpenSSL

@Tim I like Apache CXF, or Jersey, both in Java

@Kusalananda Even if there are problems, clear bug reports aren't necessarily forthcoming. I've not infrequently posted bug reports for what I considered glaring problems, after encountering them for the nth time. My experience in these cases is commonly that no bug reports were forthcoming from the rest of the planet

Examples aren't necessarily very obscure software either. I've posted bug reports for Debian's apt, for example. My conclusion is simply that people don't like writing bug reports.

Hi folks.

@StephenKitt Is GOT a symbol table? What does a GOT entry store?