Turn the scp-dbus-service methods - GetBestDrivers and MissingExecutables - of system-config-printer into C

Introduction

system-config-printer was the default printer setup tool in Red Hat/Fedora Linux for a lot of time and also got adopted by Ubuntu around ten years ago. During this time it received a lot of development work, especially on the algorithms for finding the best driver for a printer and for identifying whether printer discovery results from the CUPS backends actually come from the same physical printer.

To make these algorithms available for other printer setup tools (both interactive GUI tools and programs which fully automatically create print queues without user interaction) they got moved into a D-Bus service, scp-dbus-service. Now every other program can simply call the needed function via a D-Bus API. The printer setup tool in the GNOME Control Center for example works this way.

GNOME Control Center uses two methods - GetBestDrivers and MissingExecutables - for its printer setup. The GetBestDrivers method is used for finding the right printer drivers from ones which are available on the system. The MissingExecutables method is checking method, which is run after finding the best driver and checks if any additional software is needed for getting the printer functional.

system-config-printer was written in Python and therefore scp-dbus-service is also written in Python. This makes it depending on Python and also makes it loading the needed Python libraries into memory when started. Also most printer setup tools are written in C, Therefore it makes sense to convert the D-Bus service into the C language.

The student's task is to turn the two mentioned methods of system-config-printer into C, first as a C library with API, then as a D-Bus service (would work out-of-the-box with many GUIs) if the C library will be finished. This will make it easier to use those methods in other print tools in practically any programming language.

Mentors

Till Kamppeter, Project Leader OpenPrinting (till at linux dot com), system-config-printer upstream developer Zdenek Dohnal (zdohnal at redhat dot com)

Desired knowledge

C/C++ programming, Python programming, autoconf/automake(creating configure and Makefile), basic testing

Code license

GPL 2+ or MIT