Debian CUPS packages

Debian package madness... well, it depends on your point of view. I'm sure they have good reasons...

I'm trying to fix printing in Jaunty pup, investigating why some CUPS files are missing. I found out that I had left out the 'cups-bsd' package. I also found that /usr/lib/cups/backend was empty, but all the files are in another directory, /usr/lib/cups/backend-current.

The Debian developers mess around with packages, changing directory layout, adding Debian-specific stuff. The Woof build scripts dump some Debian-specific files, and try to make sense of changes in layout. I booted my official Ubuntu Intrepid installation, and I see that /usr/lib/cups/backend has files, but I don't know how that happens so I have done a hack, the Woof build script copies the files from /usr/lib/cups/backend-current to /usr/lib/cups/backend.

Another thing that they do is split packages up into many smaller ones. This takes me on a merry chase sometimes. In the case of the cups package, they split it into:

cups
cups-common
cups-client
libcups2
libcups2-dev
libcupsimage2
libcupsimage2-dev
cups-bsd

Tags: woof