GTK 2.0/cups printbackend

[Yousif Hassan]

Hey guys...

Applications like Evince (and others) need libprintbackend-cups.so in
order to access CUPS printers.  Right now, in order to build that file,
you need to either define WITH_CUPS or have CUPS installed prior to
building GTK.  I understand why this is done, but isn't there perhaps a
nicer way to handle this?

The problem is that GTK gets sucked in (of course) by x11/gnome2, so you
can easily miss the chance to define WITH_CUPS.  And it's no guarantee
that CUPS will already be on the system when you start (it wasn't for
me).  I was able to work around this because I know something about
ports and dependencies and Makefiles and all that, but this could give
newer users some headaches.

Can this be implemented as a menu option in GTK 2, that pops up when
it's GTK's turn to build, allowing one to add CUPS support?  If that
option is selected, you could make cups-base a dependency, build cups
first, then get back to GTK.

Just a thought - probably an easy patch - unless it's not possible due
to makefile includes being sucked in at weird times, etc (like in KDE).
Thanks for listening.

Yousif