padpowell@wateng.UUCP (PAD Powell) (12/21/84)
I have a rewritten, bug fixed (even passes LINT) version of the 4.2LPD that was distributed with 4.2BSD. Here are some of the interesting features: 1. supports multiple printing/serving devices for a single queue. 2. better accounting 3. provides for a "queue handler" process to do processing of an entry in the queue, rather than filters. This is needed if you want to support transport to some weird devices that need special handling, and can't use the standard banner printer. 4. A prefilter, built into LPR, allowing you to prefilter spool jobs. For example, you can check formats, do translation of ugly characters, tromp on users who shouldn't have access, etc. 5. Better support for test and debug. Allows you to built a VERBOSE (Hurrah!) version of LPD and friends, based on files and structures in /tmp. This can be run IN PARALLEL with the regular LPD, allowing you to test filters, printers, etc. For example, you can build a version to support an new format, and then using (old) LPD, turn off reqular printing to the device, and then the (new test) LPD to turn on the new version and try the new things. Now when it doesn't work (Murphy's Law), you can kill the test version and restart the old. I will be posting context diff's to net.sources in the near future. Note that these are pretty verbose, but that is life. Patrick Powell