Own printers, driverless only

The fourth panel this desktop handed to GNOME Settings, and the last one
worth owning.

Driverless only, deliberately. Adding a printer that describes its own
capabilities over IPP is supported; choosing a PPD or fetching a vendor
driver is not, and the page says so rather than pretending. That
restraint is the whole design: a wrong driver produces a printer that
accepts jobs, reports success, and prints nothing, which is the worst
failure this page could ship because it looks like it worked. A printer
old enough to need a PPD stays a job for the system printer tool.

Printers and the queue are separate cards because they answer separate
questions. Which printers exist is one; where a document went is the
other, and it is the one that actually brings someone here -- so the
queue is a single list across every printer.

Device URIs are validated by scheme before reaching CUPS, whose backends
run as root. file: and pipe: do not lead to a printer and are refused
here rather than further down.

This machine has no printer, so the page was built against a temporary
CUPS queue that was created, exercised through the service, and removed;
the service was confirmed to observe the removal rather than merely
perform it. Discovery and the driverless add path are verified by their
refusals rather than against hardware.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
This commit is contained in:
Gabriel Brown
2026-08-19 15:07:17 -04:00
parent 914d58f52b
commit e9d567aa72
11 changed files with 944 additions and 5 deletions
@@ -70,6 +70,10 @@ Singleton {
{ label: "Add a user", detail: "Create another account on this machine", page: "users" },
{ label: "Automatic login", detail: "Sign in without typing a password", page: "users" },
{ label: "Administrator", detail: "Which accounts can manage this machine", page: "users" },
{ label: "Printers", detail: "Add a printer and see what is queued", page: "printers" },
{ label: "Print queue", detail: "What is waiting to print, and cancelling it", page: "printers" },
{ label: "Add a printer", detail: "Find a printer on the network or enter its address", page: "printers" },
{ label: "Default printer", detail: "Where applications print unless told otherwise", page: "printers" },
{ label: "Remote login", detail: "Sign in to this machine over SSH", page: "sharing" },
{ label: "Remote desktop", detail: "See and control this desktop from elsewhere", page: "sharing" },
{ label: "Network name", detail: "The name other machines see", page: "sharing" },