Jockey very slow when searching/downloading/installing printer drivers from OpenPrinting

Please check: Make sure that Jockey ONLY searches for printer drivers, not for graphics card, and other drivers.

I have fixed this problem now, letting the initialization of the backend not do hardware detection if the backend is started via a search_driver() call with a hardware ID. Then only the databases get initialized so that the driver for the hardware item specified by the ID gets searched for. This makes the driver search significantly faster. The changes are done in a way that no APIs change to make sure that everything else of Jockey works as before. The fix is attached as a patch.

I have packaged up Jockey with the patches for this bug and bug 604698 applied. The debdiff for this package is attached. Can someone of the core developers please upload this package? Thanks.

I have updated the debdiff as the fix for the other bug (bug 604698) was not correct.

This patch needs some more effort. It breaks search_driver() for local drivers, which is used by the Appearance applet for installing a 3D capable driver. This is also caught by the test suite:

D-BUS API: Search for a noninstalled driver ... ERROR
D-BUS API: Search for a driver which gets enabled ... FAIL

We can only take this shortcut if we search for printer drivers from OpenPrinting at this point. It's a gross hack, but as long as we don't have Jockey support for Ubuntu printer driver packages in Ubuntu, then we can live with it. I won't commit that hack into trunk, though.

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jockey-hackers/jockey/trunk/revision/640 provides the db_init() splitout, and http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jockey-hackers/jockey/trunk/revision/641 provides the infrastructure for the bypass for printer drivers. It's not enabled in trunk, I'll enable it for Ubuntu.

Thanks for the initial patches!

A better long-term approach would be to just generally speed up the driver detection. It's taking painfully long right now, and it really shouldn't. Some profiling and optimization is in order here.

The general detection process is already accelerated by replacing the Foomatic XML database with a compressed PPD archive and by a small bug fix in system-config-printer. Nevertheless we also need to have the option of Jockey only searching for a driver for a given device without scanning the whole system. So we should consider the patch as an interim solution for Ubuntu until bigger architecture changes for a general solution are done.

jockey (0.5.10-0ubuntu3) maverick; urgency=low

  * Add support for bypassing local detection for search_driver(). (Merged
    from trunk). Thanks to Till Kamppeter for the initial patches!
  * jockey/ui.py: Ubuntu does not currently support local printer driver
    handlers, so speed up the lookup of remote ones by disabling local
    detection of hardware/handlers in search_driver() if we are looking for a
    printer driver. (Note that this is a hack, but the speedup is significant)
    (LP: #574396)
  * Add OSLib.notify_reboot_required() and call it in set_handler_enabled().
    Merged from trunk, and add Ubuntu specific implementation using
    /usr/share/update-notifier/notify-reboot-required in OSLib. (LP: #570215)
  * data/handlers/b43.py: Install firmware-b43-installer package instead of
    b43-fwcutter. (LP: #595344)

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Wed, 15 Sep 2010 13:35:48 +0200