Re: new module: eggcups

[John McCutchan <ttb tentacle dhs org>]

On Sat, 2004-07-17 at 13:22, Chipzz wrote:
> On Sat, 17 Jul 2004, John McCutchan wrote:
> 
> > From: John McCutchan <ttb tentacle dhs org>
> > Subject: Re: new module: eggcups
> >
> > On Sat, 2004-07-17 at 07:49, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 02:00:20PM -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> > > >
> > > > As mentioned before, this requires a D-BUS patched CUPS daemon in order
> > > > to function at all.  For reference, I've added the patch to the eggcups
> > > > module.  I'd like to consider the eggcups module the canonical reference
> > > > for this patch, so if you are a distributor and adopt it, and need to
> > > > modify the patch for any reason, please let me know.
> > > >
> > > > Unfortunately I don't think I'll have time in the near future to support
> > > > the non-DBUS case.
> > >
> > > This is going to be a sticking point.  While the d-bus support is
> > > definitely nice, I don't see us being able to depend on it's
> > > existence in GNOME proper.  On the corporate level we can all
> > > attempt to ship with the patch, but wearing my community hat I don't
> > > see us requiring it even when it merges into cupsd.  IMO we can't
> > > force a user to upgrade some piece of infrastructure to work.
> >
> > Why? We can't halt progress because some users aren't willing to upgrade
> > another part of there system. In order to make great progress on the
> > integration front we need to be willing to say that different parts of
> > the stack need to be upgraded.
> >
> > John
> 
> It doesn't have to be about the user. In debian, for example, the cups
> maintainer is a seperate maintainer from the gnome maintainers. I can
> very well understand that he would not want to integrate d-bus in cups.
> 

Why wouldn't the cups maintainer want to include the d-bus patch for
cups? I think we should just talk with the people in charge of cups, and
bring them into this conversation. If the patch is small and is isolated
in the cups code I couldn't imagine a good reason to not include it.

> Or it just be that the user is not running linux at all. There are a lot
> of people using *BSD. This doesn't pose a problem in se wrt the cups in-
> tegration, but where is udev on *BSD and GNU/Hurd?
> 
> It troubles me a bit that gnome is going in a Linux/i386 direction, and
> maybe even the RedHat/Novell direction, instead of a *NIX desktop direc-
> tion.


d-bus is not specific to linux at all. udev is for linux 2.6 but I don't
think that anyone wants gnome to depend on udev, they want to use hal.
hal is not OS-specific, the percentage of hal code that is specific to
linux is very small and well abstracted. The hal developers run linux,
there is no 'Linux/i386' conspiracy. Anyone can develop the hal backend
for *BSD (In fact I think I noticed a mention of it on the hal list). A
time is coming where we can no longer hold gnome back to the lowest
common denominator, to take gnome to a level of integration not matched
by X/XP we need to start demanding better support from the system-level
components.

John