cupsd.conf defaults need to allow reprint of jobs

pitti, WDYT, I think this configuration would make sense. And the hard disks of modern computers should be big enough to hold 50 print jobs, and it often happens that hardware problems like paper jams, toner out. or letter head paper loaded into wrong tray occur.

Hm, I'm not really sure about this. Print jobs can get very big (my wife regularly has print jobs which are some 300 MB), and keeping 50 of those around is a fairly huge space hog.

cups is neither a backup nor a revision control system, and usually I would assume that you keep documents in their "source" form as well when you print them.

However, I do see the value of keeping the previous job, so as a compromise to enable by default, what do you think about

  PreserveJobFiles Yes
  MaxJobs 2

?

pitti, for me this is OK. This is mostly to quickly correct little mistakes (for example after having closed the app and so avoiding manu more clicks to get back to the file to be printed),

yes this will work ok for me i will change my cupsd.conf to reflect this just to see how it goes cant forsee any reason i would really need to access print jobs 47 from 18 days ago

After reading the documentation I'm not so sure about this. MaxJobs does not control the number of job files which are stored on disk (which we want to keep to a minimum, such as 1), but to the total number of jobs that can be put into the queue (which should be considerably larger than 1, it is 500 by default). But at the same time we don't want to permanently store the last 500 print jobs on disk.

Thus right now I don't see a setting to control what this bug asks for, or am I missing something?

Pitti, you are right. Limiting MaxJobs limits the allowed number of jobs in the queue. So setting it to 2 or 3 will cuase problems. In gheneral a small office/home user could set it to 10 when preserving jobs, but a server user must keep it on a higher value, especially if he also wants to use quotas. So it depends highly on the users demands. Pitti you could post a feature request to CUPS for allowing different settings for the maximum of jobs allowed in the queue and the maximum of job files for completed/aborted jobs held on disk.

Looks like that we need to make these settings available in system-config-printer.

Filed upstream: http://www.cups.org/str.php?L3143

Waiting for upstream fix.

I tested in Ubuntu 10.04 and Ubuntu 10.10.

In the cups webinterface Server Settings it's possible to activate the "Preserve job print files" option, this adds PreserveJobFiles Yes to /etc/cups/cupsd.conf. Also the job history is preserved for 500 jobs by default and can be changed, this add MaxJobs # in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf.

In system-config-printer Server > Settings... > Advanced Server Settings it is also possible to select Preserve job files (allow reprinting) which add the PreserveJobFiles Yes to /etc/cups/cupsd.conf
Although the right-click Reprint option remains grayed out in system-config-printer-applet so doesn't allow reprint, but reprint works in the cups webinterface.

Till, Martin,
So it looks like cups and system-config-printer have gained support for reprint setting. OK to close this bug?

Reported bug #675259 for the grayed out Reprint option in system-config-printer-applet.

Closed for system-config-printer. Option for job preservation is there and works. "Reprint" in job viewer staying gray is hyandled in new bug report.

Hello Kemble,
Thank you for submitting this feature/enhancement request for the hplip package. You made this request quite some time ago and Ubuntu has been updated since then.

Do you think this feature/enhancement is still needed or can we close this bug report?

Thank you again for helping make Ubuntu better.
G
[Ubuntu Bug Squad volunteer triager]

Sorry, I meant: ".. with the *cups* package."