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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.

Comments

4 responses to “CUPS 2.4.19 vs. Printing”

  1. RCPete Avatar
    RCPete

    I have cups-2.4.19-x86_64-2 in my Slackware-current machine, but filtration is libcupsfilters-2.1.1-x86_64-4. I tried printing a double sided pdf document with Okular, and it did fine.

    I have to upgrade Libreoffice on the -current crash test dummies, so I don’t have an easy way to mess with paper orientation, but so far, it Just Works. (Complete with a 32 bit print driver. The Brother printer works well for my limited purposes.)

    Reply
    1. Ed Avatar
      Ed

      There seems an unusual amount of jank in the most recent Manjaro updates, so it may take a few months for everything upstream to settle down and fly in formation again.

      Reply
  2. Pasza Avatar
    Pasza

    Glad I found this. Just bought a new printer and couldn’t force it to respect requested print orientation. As I hadn’t used the printer before, I couldn’t figure out the problem was regression in cups package.

    I’m not on manjaro, but older package version happened to be in pacman cache, so I just did:

    pacman -U file:///var/cache/pacman/pkg/libcupsfilters-2.1.1-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

    pacman -U file:///var/cache/pacman/pkg/cups-2\:2.4.16-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

    Reply
    1. Ed Avatar
      Ed

      I’m not absolutely certain of a regression, but if it’s not I have no idea where else to look. Glad to know my misadventure helped you!

      Reply

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