cpdb-sys

Raw FFI bindings for the Common Print Dialog Backends C library (cpdb-libs).

This crate is automatically generated using bindgen and contains raw, unsafe declarations for the complete CPDB C API (libcpdb and libcpdb-frontend).

[!NOTE] Looking for a safe Rust API? Most users should depend on the high-level safe async crate cpdb-rs instead, which provides pure-Rust D-Bus capabilities without C library dependencies.

Supported Platforms

Target	Status	Notes
Linux (any glibc distro)	✅ Fully supported	The intended target. CI runs on Ubuntu.
macOS	⚠️ Headers-only	Bindgen can parse the headers and the crate compiles with `CPDB_NO_LINK=1`, but linking requires Linux D-Bus. Useful only for compile-checking.
Windows	❌ Not supported	`cpdb-libs` has no Windows port (D-Bus / GLib stack). Compilation will hard-fail with a `compile_error!`. Develop inside WSL Ubuntu.

Prerequisites

cpdb-libs (≥ 3.0)

cpdb-sys targets the cpdb-libs 3.x ABI and links against libcpdb and libcpdb-frontend.

[!IMPORTANT] Distro packages may be too old. As of mid-2026, Debian / Ubuntu ship cpdb-libs 2.0~b5 in libcpdb-dev. That is incompatible with this crate — installing it leaves you with both libcpdb.so.2 (from apt) and libcpdb.so.3 (from source) and the linker picks the wrong one. Either:

Build from source (recommended until distros catch up), or

Verify your package gives libcpdb.so.3.* with ls /usr/lib*/libcpdb.so.* before relying on it.

Build cpdb-libs 3.x from source:

sudo apt-get install -y \

    build-essential pkg-config autoconf automake libtool libtool-bin \

    gettext autopoint libglib2.0-dev libdbus-1-dev libclang-dev \

    libcups2-dev cups libavahi-common-dev libavahi-client-dev


# If you previously installed apt's older libcpdb*, remove it first:

sudo apt-get remove --purge libcpdb-dev libcpdb2t64 2>/dev/null


git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cpdb-libs.git

cd cpdb-libs

./autogen.sh || autoreconf -fi

./configure --prefix=/usr

make -j"$(nproc)"

sudo make install

sudo ldconfig

Fedora / RHEL: install cpdb-libs-devel from a 3.x-shipping repository, or build from source the same way.

libclang (for bindgen)

bindgen needs libclang at build time to parse C headers. On Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install -y libclang-dev clang

Build Configuration

If the library is installed to a non-standard location where pkg-config cannot locate it, you can specify the prefix path by setting the CPDB_LIBS_PATH environment variable: