[Bug 1804576] [NEW] MaxJobTime=0 results in jobs being cancelled immediately instead of never

[Launchpad Bug Tracker]

You have been subscribed to a public bug by Dariusz Gadomski (dgadomski):

[Impact]

 Setting the cupsd option MaxJobTime to 0 should make the server wait indefinitely for the job to be ready for print. Instead, after updating job-cancel-after option with MaxJobTime=0 value it results in immediate cancelling.
This leads to problems with using filters that take some time to process - the user needs to set MaxJobTime to a ridiculously high value to ensure the job is not going to get cancelled instead of just disabling the cancelling timeout.

[Test Case]

 1. Add MaxJobTime 0 option to /etc/cups/cupsd.conf.
 2. Setup a filter that takes at least several seconds to process.
    (please find a sample imagetopdf wrapper introducing 5s delay)
 3. Submit a print job matching the filter, e.g.
    lp -d my-printer someimage.jpg # jpg uses the imagetopdf wrapper

Expected result:
The job is printed after the 5s delay.

Actual result:
The job is cancelled.

[Regression Potential]

 The scope of the change is limited to fixing the MaxJobTime handling
 in scheduler/job.c and scheduler/printers.c. There should be no 
 difference in behavior except for the special value of MaxJobTime=0.
 

[Other Info]
Original bug description:

When using CUPS filters, these filters can take a few seconds to
complete.

In this case no documents are allowed to be lost on printing failures,
so we used to set "MaxJobTime 0" in cupsd.conf which worked on Ubuntu
14.04.

With cups on 18.04, you get the following message in /var/log/cups/error_log whenever the filter takes a little longer:
I [12/Nov/2018:14:43:26 +0100] [Job 18] Canceling stuck job after 0 seconds.

Then, the job is deleted and lost.

"MaxJobTime 0" is documented as "indefinite wait", but apparently cups
treats is as "wait almost not at all".

This issue appears to have also been filed upstream:
https://github.com/apple/cups/issues/5438

Temporary workaround is to set the MaxJobTime to a very large value
instead (e.g. 3 years)

** Affects: cups
     Importance: Unknown
         Status: New

** Affects: cups (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Medium
         Status: Confirmed


** Tags: sts
-- 
MaxJobTime=0 results in jobs being cancelled immediately instead of never
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1804576
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Sponsors Team, which is subscribed to the bug report.