Refering to https://dev.solus-project.com/T83 and https://www.reddit.com/r/SolusProject/comments/7flzzf/a_potential_workaround_for_nonprinting_brother/

• Name : a2ps
• Homepage : https://www.gnu.org/software/a2ps/
• Why should this be included in the repository? Please see below
• Is it Open Source (yes/no) : yes
• How many users do you anticipate will use this software? : Users of Brother printers and probably from other manufacturers
• Link to source tarball/zip file : https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/a2ps/

The issue with Brother printers have been an issue for around a year. So far, it looks that we now fixed it by not forcing ghostscript to take over in the cups-filters packages the conversion process (see https://dev.solus-project.com/R576:db7d18b846d9e6c350af3dfda045ba9e3656ae54).
a2ps can be considered as an extension to psutils as it allows the conversion of nearly any file type into postscript (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Printing-HOWTO/background.html). However, it is not clear to me if it is always necessary for all brother printers. On the other hand, Ubuntu does list it as a dependency (https://packages.ubuntu.com/de/xenial/brother-lpr-drivers-extra) as well as some Arch AUR printer driver packages.
With that being said, I would like to ask for the inclusion of the package for the following reasons:

• Allow Brother printer users to enjoy Solus
  • It looks to me that some older models require the package but not all
  • New models can probably be addressed via driverless-printing
• It extends psutils
  • @sunnyflunk mentioned here https://www.reddit.com/r/SolusProject/comments/7flzzf/a_potential_workaround_for_nonprinting_brother/dqjtqxz/ security issues. I included the patches (if allowed) from the Arch build into the package, even though I do not know if this is the issue @sunnyflunk is referring to.

Based on this, I think this would also pave the way for the inclusion of https://dev.solus-project.com/T3589 which is necessary for some Brother printer models http://support.brother.com/g/s/id/linux/en/before.html?c=us&lang=en&prod=mfcj615w_all&redirect=on , see # 6.

Thank you!

I do not really have a clue about compiling packages, thus I would like to reference my old package https://dev.solus-project.com/T83#32932
It has more compile options (taken directly from Arch) but I do not know if they are necessary or not.