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

[Robert L Krawitz <rlk alum mit edu>]

   Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 03:06:56 +0200 (CEST)
   From: Lauris Kaplinski <lauris@ariman.ee>

   There is no such thing as GNOME dependency (aside packages :).

Which you really shouldn't brush off like that.  It's quite a lot of
stuff.  My /opt/gnome (October) is 80 MB, and what looks like about 50
packages.
								  
								  There are
   dependencies to several different free libraries, which happen to be
   distributed as a part of GNOME. And some libraries has every program to
   use, if it does not want to reimplement all things under the sun...

Fine, and what do THOSE libraries depend on?  glib is actually
reasonably self contained; most of the others depend on a lot of other
stuff.  Now we start to get into DLL hell.

   Once gnome-print stabilizes enough, it would be meaningful to
   separate it into GUI and backend parts. GUI part needs and will
   always be needing libgnomeui for print-preview canvas, dialogs etc.
   Non-gui base requirements are only Gtk+ (object system) and libart
   (drawing primitives). Not very much, I think...

There's nothing wrong with the GUI stuff (and the printing API for
GNOME programs) requiring the GNOME libraries.  That's completely
appropriate.  It's the back end stuff that really needs to be done
completely independently of any UI toolkit, desktop, etc.

   Still I think that in near future libgnomeui is installed in most
   computers, so this is no-issue.

Sorry, I don't buy it.  KDE users won't do it, nor will Motif users,
nor will CDE users.  Nor, for that matter, will servers.  Servers
won't even have X installed on them.  If they need to be running X in
order to handle printing, then we're just implementing Windows all
over again, where the GUI permeates everything (and destabilizes and
bloats it).  The back end printing system *had better* be completely
independent of any particular UI choices (or lack thereof).

It bothers me that a lot of the GNOME stuff seems to assume that GNOME
will be universal, and that requiring a lot of the GNOME subsystems to
be installed is perfectly OK.  That isn't how it works in the real
world.  If you want to do a generic UNIX printing facility, you need
to completely give up on the idea of GNOME being part of it.

I'm going to suggest -- pro forma, at least -- that gnome-print
concentrate on providing a seamless UI and a good printing API for all
GNOME applications.  The caanvas idea sounds great for that purpose --
it provides an abstract imaging model that any GNOME-enabled
application can use to render for any device.  Where I think you're
overreaching is in going after the back end.

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net
Project lead for The Gimp Print --  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton