The "Printing" project is the development project
for packages which provide the base functionality
of the printing system.

The main intent of the "Printing" project is
to provide the newest kind of base printing software for
upcoming openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise versions
and at the same time with same priority to provide the
same newest base printing software also for as many
released openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise versions
as far as possible with reasonable effort.

Base printing software packages are in particular
print spooler software like CUPS,
printing filters like cups-filters,
printer drivers like HPLIP or Gutenprint,
printer driver related software like Ghostscript,
plain PPD files packages like OpenPrintingPPDs,
and other software which directly
belongs to the base printing system
like special backends for CUPS.

In contrast software which does not directly
belong to the base printing system like
user frontends (e.g. printer setup tools,
printing dialog GUIs, or other printing
related GUIs) or applications with a major
focus on printing (e.g. LaTeX or Scribus)
do usually not belong to the "Printing" project.

Of course only really free software can be
accepted in the "Printing" project.

In particular printer driver software which
is not 100% free software cannot be accepted
regardless how nice it would be when this
or that awkward printer model would work.

We will not risk any legal issue for openSUSE
and SUSE Linux Enterprise and our users and
contributors when software where the legal state
is not clear would be accepted.

An obvious precondition for any software is
that it is by default reasonably secure.
In particular for software that is run as root
(e.g. a setup tool or a special CUPS backend)
a security audit is usually required.

The "Printing" development project may contain
new software or work-in-progress changes of
existing software that might neither be in
a stable state nor fit well into currently
installed systems.

Have this in mind if you think about to install
packages from the "Printing" project into your
currently running system.

Do not use "Factory" if your system is not "Factory".
Use the matching packages for your particular system.

The packages in the "Printing" project are without
any guarantee or warranty and without any support.

As an extreme example, this means if your
complete computer center crashes because
of those packages, it is only your problem.

On the other hand this does not mean that those
packages are known to be terrible broken but
they are not thoroughly tested so that any
unexpected issue can happen.

In the end all software in the "Printing" project
are only applications which means that your system
should not "explode" when you upgrade with packages
from the "Printing" project (provided you use the
matching packages for your particular system).

If a new version does not work it should usually
help to downgrade (and to reconfigure as needed)
to get it working again.

When there are issues with the packages in the
"Printing" project we appreciate issue reports.

Regarding how to report a printing issue see
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:How_to_Report_a_Printing_Issue

For developers:

In general see
https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Factory_contribution
and
https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:How_to_contribute_to_Factory

In particular regarding how to contribute
to the "Printing" project see
https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:How_to_contribute_to_the_Printing_project

If you like to contribute major changes
for a package in the "Printing" project
first and foremost get in contact with the
maintainers of the particular package or
the maintainers of the "Printing" project.

This avoids that you do major work on your own
which might not be accepted by the package
maintainers.

The openSUSE Build Service (OBS) web pages
show maintainers of a particular package and
the maintainers of the "Printing" project.

The RPM changelog shows e-mail addresses of
those who had worked on an installed package:
"rpm -q --changelog package_name"