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

[Michael Sweet <mike easysw com>]

Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> ...
> I think you are pre-drowning on a glass of water.  Lets tackle
> problems as they arrive instead of giving up a priory because of an
> --honestly-- rather obscure setup that I can not even figure why it
> even matters.

Um, it's not that obscure and we have a LOT of customers using this
specific setup for their networks, specifically a Linux print/file
server for their Windoze clients.

Printing costs money.  Therefore, businesses, colleges, the military,
etc. want to track who is printing, what they are printing, etc.
Printing raw data makes this task nearly impossible, and like I say
below doesn't solve the printing problem for non-GNOME apps.

> > As for scalability, adding DSOs doesn't mean your solution is
> > scalable.  How many DSOs are required to implement N drivers?  N
> > DSOs?  And what about non-GNOME applications?  What do *those*
> > applications do for printing?!?
> 
> You lost me with the acronym.  I cant follow this at all.

N = a number
DSO = dynamic shared object
DSOs = dynamic shared objects
GNOME = you know what it means

How many DSOs (drivers) would you need to support sll of the
popular printers?  If you have N printers, do you need N DSOs?
How does GNOME-print discover printers, how does it discover
drivers?

Scalability means that you can expand the software to handle
larger tasks.  The internal drivers in GNOME-print fail at
this because:

    1. Drivers for network printers (served by other system)
       are not automatically available and/or configured, so
       GNOME-print does not scale to network environments.
    2. The drivers are only usable from GNOME applications,
       so GNOME-print cannot scale to support all printing
       under UNIX.

#1 also leads to problems with clients using the current version
or configuration of a printer driver, something that had been a
major thorn in our side with our customers until we came up with
CUPS.

Understand - I'm not trying to be mean-hearted.  I've just been
doing UNIX printing stuff for 7 years and printer drivers for a lot
longer.  Printing from applications is just one small problem in the
overall picture, and we need to address the whole picture if Linux
is to become a mainstream OS (with printer vendors doing Linux
drivers, etc.)

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products                  mike@easysw.com
Printing Software for UNIX                       http://www.easysw.com