Speakers
Description
Distribution-independent packaging, like Snap, Flatpak, AppImage, and also OCI container images, gets more and more common, allowing users to freely choose from thousands of apps from app stores, like on smartphones.
To be able to provide always the latest printer and scanner drivers, and also the latest and greatest for the printing stack (CUPS, Ghostscript, ...) right from upstream, we at OpenPrinting have adopted Snap at first, as it allows packaging daemons and system software, which Flatpak and AppImage do not do, and also as it has a high security level and is easy to use.
But most of the available immutable distributions accept desktop applications as Flatpaks and do not support Snap, so for adding system software to those OCI containers (Docker, podman, rockcraft) are the way to go. And OCI containers are also used in server/cloud environments. Therefore we have created official OCI container images of CUPS and the Printer Applications in a GSoC project by Rudra Pratap Singh, mentored by Canonical's containerization expert Cristovão Cordeiro.
And there were also first attempts of packaging daemons as Flatpaks ...
This talk will be about our distribution-independent packaging of CUPS and printer drivers, the different packaging systems, their strengths and weaknesses, the challenges and how we have dealt with them.
Author(s) Bio
Till is leader of OpenPrinting since it was founded in 2001, introduced the CUPS printing system in Mandrake Linux in 2000 working at MandrakeSoft and with this and a lot of evangelism (booths, talks, workshops) made the other distros also switch to CUPS, since 2006 printing maintainer at Canonical, co-organizing annual meetings with the Printer Working Group (PWG), since 2008 every year mentoring in Google Summer of Code, doing everything to make printing on Linux and alike operating systems "just work". Due to the fact that printing goes through several daemons (CUPS, Printer Applications) got a daemon snapper and Snap enthusiast and evangelist. Till is also fellow of the Linux Foundation.
Soumyadeep Ghosh is a member of the Snapcrafters team. He created and maintains a number of content snaps and helped create the CI used by snapcrafters. Outside Snapcrafters, he is also a Ubuntu Member and helps out with various other organizations such as the Ubuntu Flutter Community, NickVisionApps, Pacstall, and more. For more information, check out https://soumyadghosh.github.io/website/about/
Twitter and/or Mastodon Handle
Till: Mastodon: @till@ubuntu.social
Soumyadeep: Mastodon: @soumyadghosh@mastodon.social Twitter: https://x.com/s0umyad
| Participation | In-person |
|---|---|
| Track | Main Track |
| Level of Difficulty | Intermediate |
| Pronouns | Till: He/Him, Soumyadeep: He/Him |
