Re: Retiring lpr and lpd

On Fri, Feb 20, 2026 at 07:40:54PM +0100, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> The lp* family of printing utilities have received practically no
> maintenance in two decades and are showing their age.  What's worse,
> most of them are setugid, and lpd(8) is a network-facing daemon with
> IP-based authentication and little to no input validation.  Furthermore,
> better-maintained alternatives are available from ports: print/lprng is
> a drop-in replacement derived from the same code base, while print/cups
> provides far more functionality and a compatible command-line interface.
> 
> Unless someone steps up and does a credible job of modernizing these
> utilities, we have no other choice than to retire lp(1), lpc(8), lpd(8),
> lpq(1), lpr(1), lprm(1), lptest(1), and pac(8) from base.
> 
> In the next few days, I will commit patches to add deprecation notices
> to all relevant manual pages (D55381) and switch the LPR build option
> from default-on to default-off (D55380).  The code will remain in the
> tree, and remain buildable, but unless the situation changes, it will be
> removed from the tree no later than shortly before stable/16 is branched
> in the fall of 2027.
I am regulary using this.
What is problem?
Don't fix what isn't broken