About a week ago, I’ve upgraded CUPS from 1.1 to 1.2 on my print server. I know one should never touch a working CUPS installation, but as Debian 4.0 is based on CUPS 1.2 I’d have to make the upgrade sooner or later anyway.
Of course, after the upgrade my printing stopped working as usually. As this was my second CUPS 1.1 to 1.2 upgrade attempt I already knew about some problems of the upgrade process and could get run at least the CUPS HTTP and IPP interfaces. But the printers worked in weird ways such as printing a single page in several pieces put on separate sheets or stopping to work after finishing a printing job.
To keep the story short, after a week of various efforts I ended up with complete removal of printing software on the server and its reinstallation. Then the CUPS HTTP configuration interfaces started to offer right configuration items and after a few attempts I could get my printing run properly.
I can only hope that after the upcoming Debian 4.0 release Debian slows down its release cycle again, so that I won’t have to suffer all the software upgrade headaches each one or two years… In the meantime, let we software developers think more about impact of the changes we make to our great software.
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