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

[Ben Woodard <ben valinux com>]

> Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> > ...
> > So?  IPP is just a transport.
> 
> That's what you were proposing with your CORBA "solution".
> 
> IPP is the "standard" protocol endorsed by the IETF and most of the
> printing industry for communicating with printers and printing
> systems.
> 
> Printer management, drivers, color management, font management, etc.
> belong in the server that handles queuing, filtering, etc. of jobs.
> CUPS provides all of that AND IPP support, so all your GNOME-print
> API would need to do is communicate with the print server (which in
> many cases will be running locally) to get printer information, send
> print jobs, etc.
> 
> That translates into a smaller, faster, simpler GNOME-print API, and
> smaller, faster, simpler applications.  It also means that non-GNOME
> apps (they DO exist, ya know!) will have access to the same printing
> services.
> 

Why don't we all brainstorm on a gnome-print API for talking to the
underlying spooling system. Michael, you implement it for CUPS. I'll
implement it for LPR (maybe someone else can do it for LPRng) and
Miguel you and your team write to the API. We can either do this as a
traditional shared library that applications call or we can make it a
component. 

Right off the bat I can see that we will need:
    submit a print job
    delete a print job
    start a print queue
    stop a print queue
    disable spooling
    enable spooling
    enumerate printers
    enumerate capablities of printer (probably a whole bunch of
different calls -- needs much thought and discussion)
    call device setup function (PPD like stuff)

I think that most of the work will have to go into the "enumerate
capabilities of printer" portion of the API. 

Miguel start dumping your wishlist for kinds of things you need from
the underlying spooling system and I'll make sure that it gets
implemented.

-ben