Extension of PPU rights for printing and scanning: libppd

[Till Kamppeter]

Hi,

for those who only recently joined the DMB. I am leading the 
OpenPrinting project [1] [2] and for Ubuntu I have PPU rights for all 
printing- and scanning-related packages in Main and I am also MOTU.

With the introduction of the New Architecture for printing and scanning 
[3] into Ubuntu some re-structuring is happening in the printing stack 
in Ubuntu, which creates some new packages in Main.

The part which has actually landed (in 23.04) is the second generation 
of cups-filters (versions 2.x). To separate out the support for PPD 
files and classic CUPS drivers, which will not be supported any more in 
the New Architecture, the upstream project cups-filters got split 
up/re-organized into libcupsfilters, libppd, cups-filters, and cups-browsed.

Being part of the current printing stack and being needed for CUPS to 
continue to work these source packages all need to be in Main, so I did 
a MIR [4] which got already completed and therefore these source 
packages are all in Main now. See also details about these packages in 
the MIR.

For the packages libcupsfilters and cups-browsed I already get the PPU 
rights as they contain only code which is split off from cups-filters, 
for which I already had PPU rights.

For libppd I still need PPU rights, and there Steve asked me to mail to 
the DMB for which I am doing now.

libppd contains all the PPD file support functionality of the current 
CUPS (version 2.4.2) which will go away from CUPS in version 3.x, due 
end of this year. libppd is nearly completely copied together from CUPS 
code, with only some renamings for API consistency and to promote some 
library-internal functions to the public API. There is only little new 
code to provide PPD file support to the filter functions of 
libcupsfilters and to get classic CUPS filters based on the filter 
functions (files ppd/ppd-filter.c and ppd/ppd-ipp.c) and the PPD file 
generator for using driverless IPP printers in CUPS 2.x is overtaken 
from cups-filters (ppd/ppd-generator.c).

So libppd can also be considered as a split-off of code which I had 
already PPU rights for, via the cups and cups-filters packages.

The current libppd (version 2.x) has nothing to do with the (now removed 
[5]) libppd from > 20 years ago which was a port of CUPS' PPD 
functionality into filters for LPD/LPRng, residing as a dead body in 
Universe all the time.

So I would like to ask you whether you could grant me PPU rights for libppd.

If any additional information is needed, please tell me.

    Till


[1] https://openprinting.github.io/about-us/
[2] https://openprinting.github.io/news/
[3] 
https://openprinting.github.io/current/#the-new-architecture-for-printing-and-scanning
[4] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2003259
[5] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2000411