Distribution-independent packaging, like Snap, Flatpak, AppImage, and also OCI containers, gets more and more common, allowing users to freely choose from thousands of apps from app stores, like on smartphones.

To be able to provide always the latest printer and scanner drivers, and also the latest and greatest for the printing stack (CUPS, Ghostscript, ...) right from upstream, we at OpenPrinting have adopted Snap at first, as it allows packaging daemons and system software, which Flatpak and AppImage do not do, and also as it has a high security level and is easy to use.

But most of the available immutable distributions accept desktop applications as Flatpaks and do not support Snap, so for adding system software to those OCI containers (Docker, podman, ROCKs) are the way to go. And OCI containers are also used in server/cloud environments. Therefore we are also working on official OCI containers of CUPS and the Printer Applications.

This talk will be about our distribution-independent packaging of CUPS and printer drivers, the different packaging systems, their strengths and weaknesses, the challenges and how we have dealt with them.