Re: new module: eggcups

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, 2004-07-16 at 21:14, Chipzz wrote:
> 
> 1) Despite what you may think or say, people _DO_ want to see other
>    peoples jobs. It is extremely relevant when you have a shared printer
>    at work or at college where queues can mean you have to wait 2 hours
>    to get your print job.

Aha! That is why the print dialog now lists the status of each printer,
iirc, so you can see which printer is free. Part of the overall printing
UI design.

For the scenario you mention, the old way users would have to:
 - decide to print
 - leave their application and find the printer browser or look 
   at all the printer icons in notification area
 - open the job list for each printer, looking for a free printer
 - return to the app and open the print dialog
 - find the printer corresponding to the free one located 
   earlier
 
But if you list which printers are free *in the print dialog*:
 - decide to print
 - press Print
 - choose least-busy printer from a list

Even if you don't buy that, eggcups doesn't prevent some other place or
app in the desktop showing a list of all jobs. It's just one part of the
printing UI.

> 2) dbus patched cups -> not going to happen any time soon in distro's I
>    think. People may be very reluctant to do this.

We've had a D-BUS patch in CUPS since Fedora Core 1. It's a
runtime-optional thing, there's no hard dependency.

To make the desktop as good as Windows/OSX in certain ways, we are going
to have to rely on distribution changes to enable certain features. e.g.
the HAL stuff requires plenty of system integration as well.

In Fedora and Red Hat at least, we are pretty much requiring D-BUS and
using it pervasively as a system-level OS component. I get the
impression Novell is leaning the same way, though I can't speak for
them.

There are just some things you can't do very well without modifying the
underlying system, so for GNOME to make progress we need to allow
features that are enabled only on systems that support them. There's
nothing too difficult about the system changes so any OS vendor or
volunteer group that's paying any attention should be able to track
them.

Havoc