Could you please format your email as lines of text?  To see how I see it,
browse http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-help/2002/03/17/0004.html in
Netscape.  (^&  Email doesn't (so far as I have heard) really say what to
do with long lines, save that lines of up to 1000 bytes are permitted.
It looks a bit better in Konqueror than in Netscape, but...

I can't say why printing disabled (all printcap entries are commented out
by default, yes?).  I can say why I'd do it: Enable any entry and you're
bound to get it wrong for many people.  It's better to have a *vanilla*
system fail to print than to have it start spewing pages of garbage.

LPRng: Can you summarize why one might use LPRng in a home network?  I
looked at the LPRng site, but didn't see reason to install it.  Did I miss
something, or did you mean to exclude home-users?

/dev/lp*: Default selection of devices may be a problem.  I've used the
interrupt-based, and interruptless versions of /dev/lp* on port-i386.
I've used another variant that doesn't reset the port on open.  I
presently use a USB ulpt.

How many other /dev/ nodes may refer to some kind of printer?  (Bear in
mind that some printers are serial printers, and look at all ports...)

Default filters: I would rather the default printer configuration be kept
simple.  Attaching a printer will likely require fiddling with any default
config.  The simpler that the suggested/default configs are, the easier it
is to figure out what they are doing.

Also, as I recall, it was helpful when first setting up printer support to
be able to run GhostScript manually over a file, then simply print the
result.  This won't work well if you have filters installed.


Perhaps instead of a patch to the system files, you could provide a small
script that could be make into a package for pkgsrc.  The script could
parse dmesg's output, query the user for a few things, and rewrite the
/etc/ files (and create any necessary directories.


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu