Bug 148099

Not possible because of security.

If the root pasword would be the CUPS admin pasword by default,
we had two places where the root password is stored
(/etc/shadow and /etc/cups/passwd.md5) and therefore
two possible ways to crack the root password.

The unexperienced user should use YaST to set up the queues
and then he doesn't need to know about lppasswd at all.

The experienced user is expected to read the documentation
if something doesn't work out of the box.

Any printer admin tool which runs as root on localhost
doesn't need CUPS admin authentication because root on
localhost has admin access to the cupsd in any case.
Therefore YaST and lpadmin don't do CUPS admin authentication.

When KDE or whatever other printer admin tools don't provide
a way to run as root on localhost, then those tools don't
support all ways to administrate printers in CUPS.
As far as I know the Gnome printer admin tool
does "root at localhost" authentication.

Only the CUPS web interface must do CUPS admin authentication
in any case because the server (cupsd) cannot know for sure where
the client (browser) runs (as root on localhost or as any user
on any remote system).

In particular in business environment it is a big problem if the
root password would be stored at an additional place without
explicite notification of the system administrator.

The business system admin may like to use the CUPS web frontend
and then he must set the CUPS admin password explicitely.
Of course we cannot prevent him to use the root password
for the CUPS admin but then he hopefully knows what this means
when he does the authentication via network using the HTTP protocol.
It is the same as if he writes down the root password on a memo
and places it at the entrance door of the building ;-)

Thanks a lot for the explanation and not just marking this as invalid without it!