Re: Printing woes

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 08:16:20AM +1000, frank brierley wrote:
> Limited time has resulted in a focusing of effort within the gnome-print 
> project towards the integration of cups.  This suggest that while we 
> don't need gnome to run gnumeric, we do need cups to print.

That is pretty much the situation.
 
> But is this restriction wise?  Might there not be benefits in allowing 
> choice?

Don't confuse cause and effect here.  The key here is limited time,
not a desire to limit choice.

> I believe it would be a serious mistake for gnome-print to be written to 
> encapsulate cups exclusively.

That is a given.  The code is written to abstract the backends.
Indeed it is possible to do the lookup you'd like.  It's not even
terribly hard.  I had a look yesterday and figure it could be done
fairly quickly.  The problem boils down to time.

> Andreas says "lpr is always assumed to be available to fall back to." If 
> lpd is to be relied upon when all else fails shouldn't it at least 
> receive some nominal support?

It depends on your definition of nominal.  We can send data there,
but have not had time to add more advanced features like printcap
parsing.  It would be nice to do it, but to be frank there are lots
of other things ahead of it on the queue.