CUPS 2.4.19 vs. Printing

After a rather tedious morning devoted to figuring out why printing had suddenly stopped working, it seems there’s something badly wrong with the most recent CUPS update.

The symptoms included:

• Wrong sheet orientation for multi-page output regardless of the Landscape or Portrait setting
• No output at all, generally with a CUPS error message

The error messages were utterly inscrutable:

• “missing required flags”
• “cfFilterChain: pdftopdf (PID 8189) stopped with status 1”
• “temp file (object 3 0, offset 11462): dictionary has duplicated key /x12; last occurrence overrides earlier ones”

Downgrading two packages restored the status quo ante:

• libcupsfilters 2.2.1-2 → 2.1.1-4
• cups 2.4.19-1 → 2.4.16-2

Perhaps cups need not be reverted, but I’m loathe to fiddle around with it now that printing works again.

Those are now frozen in /etc/pacman.conf:

IgnorePkg = cups libcupsfilters

The least-awful way to downgrade / revert packages seems to be with manjaro-downgrade. You can, of course, do it on hard mode with pacman or pamac, but perusing a list of what’s in the update cache helped figure out what just changed.

And there they will sit until the next update rolls through.