cups-filters Second Generation - Third Beta Release!

During creation of the Debian, Ubuntu, and Red Hat packages for the components of the 2nd-generation of cups-filters and also during the investigation of reported issues some more bugs got discovered and fixed.

Especially in all the component’s source code tarballs the LICENSE file was missing, which is a problem for Linux distributions using the packages. Now all license- and copyright-relevant files, AUTHORS, COPYING, LICENSE, and NOTICE are included in the source tarballs of all the 4 components.

Also unnecessary dependencies, remaining from the times when everything was only a single repository, and overlooked during the separation, got removed, especially in libcupsfilters.

And minor functional glitches and shortcomings, discovered by users (using cups-filters 1.x but the problem continued in 2.x) and by Debian´s and Ubuntu’s automatic testing during package build (autopkgtest), got spotted and fixed.

libcupsfilters

• cfFilterGhostscript(): Select correct ICC profile for PCL-XL. When using the cfFilterGhostscript() filter function to generate PCL-XL (PXL, PCL 6, Ghostscript output devices “pxlmono”, “pxlcolor”) output, always the color IPP profile srgb.c was used, also for monochrome output (“pxlmono”) and this makes Ghostscript error out. Now we correctly select sgray.icc for monochrome output.
• cfGetPrinterAttributes(): Poll media-col-database separately if needed. Some printers are not able to handle a get-printer-attributes request querying both the all group attribute and the media-col-database attribute, so query the latter with a separate call in such cases.
• cfGenerateSizes(): Also parse the media-col-ready IPP attribute for page sizes and margins. This often reveals extra margin variants, like borderless.
• Removed public cfPDFOut...() API (cupsfilters/pdfutils.h). This API only makes sense if the API of fontembed is also public, but this we made private earlier.
• Build system, README.md: Remove unnecessary dependencies overlooked during the separation: zlib (only needed by libppd), Freetype (not needed any more after removal of pdftoopvp), Avahi and GLib (both only needed by cups-browsed). Thanks a lot, Zdenek Dohnal (Pull request #7).
• COPYING, NOTICE: Added copyright year 2023
• COPYING, NOTICE, AUTHORS: Added Jai Luthra and Vikrant Malik

cups-filters

• texttopdf: Do not include fontconfig.h in the CUPS filter wrapper
• Build system: Do not explicitly check for libpoppler-cpp The cups-filters package does not contain any code using libpoppler-cpp, therefore we let ./configure not check for it.
• Add templates for issue reports on GitHub. This makes a selection screen appear when clicking “New Issue” in the web UI, to select whether the issue is a regular bug, a feature request, or a security vulnerability.

General

• COPYING, NOTICE: Simplification for autotools-generated files autotools-generated files can be included under the license of the upstream code, and FSF copyright added to upstream copyright list. Simplified COPYING appropriately.
• Makefile.am: Include LICENSE in distribution tarball

Packages

• libcupsfilters: More Details and Download, Discussion
• libppd: More Details and Download, Discussion
• cups-filters: More Details and Download, Discussion
• cups-browsed: More Details and Download, Discussion

Note that braille-printer-app will only be released once the conversion to a Printer Application got committed.