# Printing w/o cups; dependency question



## znanie (Jun 7, 2010)

Hello,

If this is not the right place to ask this question, please let me know.

I thought to use the lpd system for printing and deleted the cups package.  It seems that many other programs are ported so as to require cups.  For example, gs does not run now.  Firefox, though it was also listed as a program that depends on cups, seems to run fine.

I had compiled and used many of these same programs on Slackware Linux.  There they worked compiled and worked fine without cups.  Seems like programs compiled on FreeBSD have more dependencies than what was required under Slackware.

So now, when I went to compile the cups port, it wants espgs-8.15-4.  I have gs-8.71 on the system.

These dependencies are confusing.  Does a user have any control over this? 

Thanks

Kirill


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## wblock@ (Jun 7, 2010)

znanie said:
			
		

> I thought to use the lpd system for printing and deleted the cups package.  It seems that many other programs are ported so as to require cups.  For example, gs does not run now.  Firefox, though it was also listed as a program that depends on cups, seems to run fine.



Depends on what you do.  But having cups installed as a dependency doesn't mean you have to use it.



> So now, when I went to compile the cups port, it wants espgs-8.15-4.  I have gs-8.71 on the system.



Possibly due to an outdated ports tree.



> These dependencies are confusing.  Does a user have any control over this?



Sure.  Before you build the port, use `# make config` to set the options.  For example, you can turn off ghostscript's use of cups.

This is another reason to use ports instead of packages.  Packages, being precompiled, have the default options turned on and you're stuck with them.


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