PWG May 2020 Face-to-Face Meeting - SummaryMay 13, 2020

The PWG held its May 2020 Virtual Face-to-Face Meeting on May 5-8, 2020 via WebEx teleconferences. This event was held in collaboration with Linux Foundation OpenPrinting Workgroup. Sessions were presented by both organizations over the event's 3 days. Representatives from Apple, Artifex, Canon, Canonical, Google, Gutenprint, High North, HP Inc., Kyocera, Lakeside Robotics, Lexmark, Qualcomm, Red Hat, Ricoh, TIC, TCS and Xerox attended the meetings, as well as several independent individuals. Attendees reviewed work in progress, including drafts of a number of in-progress specifications, and discussed liaisons with partner groups. Here is a summary of the proceedings.

Linux Foundation OpenPrinting Workgroup

The Linux Foundation OpenPrinting Workgroup sessions were presented on the first day. Ira McDonald reviewed the Linux OpenPrinting project's accomplishments from 2019 and surveyed the efforts under way for 2020. Work continues to move from CUPS 2.2.x to 2.3, and to fully support IPP System Service. Ira reviewed the status of OP Google Summer of Code (GSoC) work to occur in 2020, as well as Google Season of Docs.

Aveek Basu presented a review of the Linux OpenPrinting Workgroup's projects that are active in 2020. He discussed in more detail the upcoming "Google Summer of Code 2020" projects that will implement frameworks for developing CUPS Printer Applications, a Linux GUI application to administer multi-function devices via the IPP System Service, an IPP Scan server, cups-browsed optimizations, and PDF raster extraction. He also covered the Linux OpenPrinting Workgroup's engagement in the "Linux Plumbers Conference", "Linux Foundation Members Summit 2020", and the "Open Printing Mini Conference" at Indian Institute of Technology in November 2019. Mike Sweet presented on two CUPS Printer Application projects he is working on (ippeveprinter and LPrint), as well as the PAPPL Printer Application framework he has developed to make it easier to write CUPS printer applications. He described the value that Printer Applications provide as a more self-contained replacement for legacy printer drivers. His PAPPL project is a C-based framework for developing new Printer Applications.

After a short lunch break, Michael Vrhel reviewed the status of Ghostscript, MuPDF and associated projects such as MuJS and MuPDF WebAssembly. A large focus of the work over the last year has been pruning seldom used or incomplete features, especially those that cause a disproportionate number of defects. Sean Kau presented "Printing in Chrome OS", covering system details that differ from other operating system environments and how that affects printing support. Many of the software components developed by the Linux Foundation OpenPrinting Workgroup, as well as an unmodified CUPS release, are deployed as the core components of the Chrome OS print system. IPP Everywhere is supported out-of-box and helps to enable universal printing. Sean reviewed the changes made since he presented last in May 2019.

After another break, Till Kamppeter presented a detailed survey of completed, in-process and future work in the "cups-filters" and "ippusbxd" projects and related work on Driverless Scanning, CUPS in a Snap, and patches contributed to Avahi, a commonly used open source implementation of mDNS / DNS-SD. Many bug fixes were made in 2018, and work continues on both of these projects.

Minutes are available here: https://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/liaison/openprinting/minutes/OP-Summit-Minutes-20200505.htm

PWG Plenary

The PWG sessions began on the second day with the PWG Chair presenting the PWG Plenary. We reviewed the overall state of the PWG, its programs and initiatives, and briefly discussed upcoming face-to-face meeting scheduling. We noted that there are currently 412 printers certified under the PWG's IPP Everywhere™ Self Certification program, which hasn't changed in some time, but more certifications are believed to be in progress from multiple vendors pending the release of IPP Everywhere™v1.1. We discussed the PWG Steering Committee's activities and initiatives, including its 2020 goals, the status of Process 4.0 and updated policies, public relations efforts, recently approved documents, process document updates, the website migration initiative, and "toolset" alternatives for producing specifications. Each active PWG workgroup (IDS Workgroup and IPP Workgroup) summarized their current status. Finally, we reviewed the status of our partners' work in Trusted Computing Group (TCG), IETF, Linux Foundation OpenPrinting Workgroup, Mopria Alliance and INCITS.

Complete minutes are available here: https://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/general/minutes/pwg-plenary-minutes-20200506.htm

Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) Workgroup

On the first day, Ira McDonald (IPP WG Co-Chair) and Mike Sweet (IPP WG Secretary) surveyed the status of current IPP Workgroup works in progress, noting that there will be an update to the charter in 2020. IPP Everywhere v1.1 and IPP Everywhere Self Certification v1.1 are both in PWG Call for Objections, ending on May 15, 2020, and the new JSON based self-certification submission portal is live. After a break, we reviewed the latest draft of Job Accounting with IPP v1.0, and tangentially discussed whether a PWG Best Practices document can contain normative language, which will be further clarified in PWG policy documents following Steering Committee discussion.

On the second day, after the IDS Workgroup session, the group reviewed the latest draft of IPP Enterprise Printing Extensions v2.0. After reviewing changes to earlier portions of the specification, the group observed that the "job-hold-until" attribute is not suitable for specifying a persistent release method in a Job, and moved to instead define a new attribute to satisfy this requirement. Differences with job state on Logical Device Printers vs. Physical Device Printers was also discussed.

On the third day, the IPP Workgroup sessions started with a review of IPP Production Printing Extensions v2.0, which is nearing completion. We then discussed IPP Driverless Printing Extensions v2.0 and specifically had a more detailed discussion about how to address the issue of "print-quality" extensibility, and discussed its meaning, scope and related issues. An incremental path forward was proposed at the end of the discussion, that will be added to the next draft, as a path forward. After a break, Paul Tykodi (IPP WG Co-Chair and lead PWG 3D Printing Liaison) led a discussion on the status of the PWG's 3D Printing liaisons and the guidance we will be providing to our partners. We spent some time discussing how to bridge the "perception gaps" between what IPP 3D provides and what the industry is asking for, and we discussed updating our slides and topic page with more interaction models and other diagrams to paint a more complete picture. We concluded the IPP WG sessions with next steps.

Complete minutes are available here: https://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/ipp/minutes/ippv2-f2f-minutes-20200506.pdf

Imaging Device Security (IDS) Workgroup

At the start of the second day, Alan Sukert (acting IDS WG Chair) led the IDS Workgroup status and progress discussion. We went through the minutes of the latest HCD international TC (iTC) meetings, discussed the 31-step cPP development plan and some thoughts on what the content of HCD collaborative Protection Profile (cPP) v1.0 should include. The scope should cover what is needed by 2022, to keep it on a reasonable schedule. A v1.1 should be expected, to pick up any key SFRs not included in v1.0. Publishing the HCD cPP/SD 1.0 in a timely manner will establish it in the community and provide a foundation for further updates. Ira discussed Compact TLS and noted that, though it won't be in the HCD cPP v1.0 or the Network Device (ND) cPP in the near term, it should be monitored. The group then shifted to discussing Ira's draft HCD Security Guidelines v1.0 document, which is being written as a PWG Best Practices document. The group discussed which topics were in scope. Alan then discussed standards activities outside the HCD iTC that were deserving of attention, such as the IETF's RATS (Remote ATtestation ProcedureS) and SAAG (Security Area Advisory Group). We wrapped up with next steps.

Complete minutes are available here: https://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/ids/minutes/ids-f2f-minutes-20200507.pdf

Next PWG Face-to-Face Meeting

The next PWG Face-to-Face meeting will be August 26-27, 2020 via WebEx teleconference. Please check the PWG Meetings page for updates on plans for upcoming meetings.