[Gnome-print] Re: ghostscript todo

[Raph Levien <raph acm org>]

Mathieu Lacage wrote:
> 
> hi all,
> 
> Just to make things clear, we have seen chema and lauris stating how they want
> to see gnome-print evolve but I am curious as what you plan to do on ghostscript
> as maintainer in the near future.
> 
> You seem to be willing at least to interoperate with gnome-print-admin when it
> reaches some kind of usefulness.
> Any other ways ghostscript would integrate in the current gnome-print ?
> Or gnome-print could integrate in ghostscript :) depending on the way you see it ;)

I'm drafting an open letter to the development community which will
outline my plans for Ghostscript in detail. Here are a few highlights in
brief:

The Ghostscript core is going to remain relatively unchanged, at least
from the outside (Peter Deutsch and I are implementing PDF 1.4
rendering, which is of course a pretty big change on the inside). In
particular, it's not going to take on any dependencies such as glib.

On the other hand, I think there should also be a Gnome build of
Ghostscript, with a full set of dependencies on glib, gtk+, gnome-libs,
and gnome-print-admin. This should be the main version that Linux users
of Ghostscript see. For one, I'd like to see a PostScript and PDF viewer
of comparable scope to Adobe Acrobat reader. For printing, it should be
able to use the Gnome infrastructure for config and so on.

I think the jury is still out on whether Gimp Print or Omni will be the
driver collection of choice. In either case, I'm pretty happy to defer
to one of them instead of trying to maintain responsibility for drivers
inside GS. As I mentioned, the drivers are of fairly low quality, and
there's no modular architecture.

I hope this answers your questions at least well enough to whet your
appetite for when I get a better thought through document together.

Take care,

Raph

-- 
Raph Levien <raph@artofcode.com>  |  artofcode LLC  |  www.artofcode.com