Re: [Gnome-print] Re: [Gimp-print-devel] An introduction to gnome-print (fwd)

[Ben Woodard <ben valinux com>]

> 
> >    It is fully optional.  I have my own GNOME without sound, because it
> >    pisses me off.  
> > 
> > Why on earth do I even *want* sound and X *installed* on a dedicated
> > print server, already?  It's just that many more things to go wrong.
> 
> Who said you needed it?
> 
> But I think we are thinking about different things.  Because I am not
> thinking of gnome-print as a "server" process, but as something that
> is used on the client side.
> 
> > Maybe.  I happen to work on high end servers (take a guess at the kind
> > of scale -- processors, memory, disk -- I'm talking about; I'm curious
> > what you think of in that context).
> 
> I dont care about high end servers.  Last time I checked no person in
> my block or in my city could afford one of those for their living
> room.
> 
> I dont care about servers.  There are way too many people caring about
> servers.  I care about the desktop and end-users.
> 

Miguel, may I respectfully ask that you care a bit about servers at
least in the printing arena. 

A huge amount of printing is done in business by people under the
thumbs of a totalitarian IT people who force them to print through
print servers. I know, I have been one of those totalitarian IT people
who made more than 30,000 users pander to my wishes if they ever
wanted to get their documents near one of the 3500 printers I
administered.

What you are proposing with client side rendering is quite a lot like
what windows does and I must say that having lived through the
maddening problems, "that way be madness". The problems are so severe
that even MS has admitted that there are enough problems that they
invented metafile spooling. Have you considered a similar solution
that will allow you all the flexibility that you need while keeping
the rendering down in the print subsystems?

-ben