Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2026 22:17:16 -0500 From: Mark Johnston <markj@freebsd.org> To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@freebsd.org> Cc: Dag-Erling =?iso-8859-1?Q?Sm=F8rgrav?= <des@freebsd.org>, stable@freebsd.org, arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The future of lpr and lpd Message-ID: <aZkjvHM-HSPAsLb8@nuc> In-Reply-To: <aZkLEgC-fn7cLVg7@hydra.lemis.com> References: <86wm07xnre.fsf@ltc.des.dev> <aZkLEgC-fn7cLVg7@hydra.lemis.com>
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On Sat, Feb 21, 2026 at 12:32:02PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > On Friday, 20 February 2026 at 19:39:49 +0100, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote: > > Due to low code quality, known bugs, and a general lack of interest > > over the past several decades, we are currently considering retiring > > the entire lp* suite (lp(1), lpc(1), lpd(8), lpq(1), lpr(1), > > lprm(1), lptest(1), pac(8)) from base. > > As others have noted, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Clearly it > *is* broke, but you're replacing it, not fixing it. And who are "we"? > And why are you removing it rather than replacing it? "we" is srcmgr@, or at least, that's where the discussion started. Dag-Erling has indeed done the rather tedious work to fix the bugs which prompted the original announcement. I believe he does not wish to further maintain these utilities, and someone with the time and ability to maintain or replace them has plenty of time to step up. > > It would be extremely helpful if those of you who are using base lpr / > > lpd today could take the time to try out the lprng package / the > > print/lprng port (which should be a drop-in replacement) and let me know > > if there is any loss of functionality. > > OK, good that you have done this. Did you coordinate (or at least > discuss) this with the other BSDs? > > And why a new name? It is not the same code. > We didn't change "FreeBSD" to "FreeBSDng" when we > released 5.0 decades ago. And IIRC some other utilities have been > replaced with rewrites, without the name changing. And then there are > things like postfix and cups (shudder) that reuse the old names. So > if it HAS to be a port, why not call it print/lpr? If it isn't 100% > compatible (think of names hard-coded in scripts), what is the > difference? Why? And in which version of ports is print/lprng? I > don't find it in my tree. Dag-Erling is referring to sysutils/LPRng, I believe. > Once an argument for FreeBSD was that it installed with all tools out > of the box. Removing things from base just moves towards the Linux > view of the world. This argument only holds so long as developers are actively maintaining said things from base. At a minimum, this consists of handling bug reports and making sure that a reasonable baseline of code quality is maintained.home | help
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