[Gimp-print-devel] OSX support (Was Re: CITIZEN photo printers)

[Solomon P. <pi...@sh...>]

On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 01:09:50PM -0500, Solomon Peachy wrote:
> Can you provide some specifics to what you mean by "commercial grade"?  
> Gutenprint is already widely used for commercial purposes (such as photo 
> kiosks) and it is not clear how Gutenprint may be lacking in this 
> regard.  Are you perhaps interested in using Gutenprint as the basis of 
> an application SDK, or looking to replace your current OSX drivers?

Gary and I have done a few rounds of off-list discussion, but he's going 
to be out of the office for a few days so it seemed like time to bring 
it back into the open to see what everyone else thinks.

Essentially, Citizen is considering using Gutenprint as the basis of 
their future OSX drivers.  Thanks to customer demand, they are also 
interested in providing official Linux support too.

From our discussions, it appears as if the core printer support is 
already essentially complete and fairly well tested, so I expect there 
will only be a little bit of work to be done on the hardware enablement 
front (essentially fixing any bugs uncovered by a proper QA cycle with 
real hardware, and possibly tuning the output or creating an ICC profile 
to match what their existing drivers generate)

So while that is all good and beneficial for all involved, I believe 
they're really looking for a one-stop vendor relationship that can, for 
appropriate consideration, produce an installable driver package for 
them, and provide ongoing maintainence and feature releases as bugfixes, 
hardware, and new OS releases warrant.  They would handle end-user 
support.

That's a reasonable wish, but what's unclear is the level of polish 
they're after -- eg are they okay with a generic Gutenprint driver 
package not unlike we already supply today, or would they want some sort 
of unique-to-citizen release? Would they want unique-to-OSX features, 
like a spiffier control panel or status monitor?  And (rather 
importantly) are the terms of the GPL acceptible?

On the Linux front, exising Linux distro channels are probably okay if 
they are recent enough, but for older/enterprise/LTS-type distros it 
would be highly advantagous if we could provide more up-to-date OS 
packages.  That would tie nicely into the CI system we've been talking 
about for a while.

Personally, I don't think Gutenprint as a project is in a position to 
provide much more than we already do, mostly due to our very limited 
resources and expertise with respect to OSX.  Of our current-ish 
contributors, only Steve has the ability to even generate OSX builds, 
and we're entirely reliant upon him to test those builds.

I'm also not terribly fond of Apple, but if improving things for OSX 
gains us additional resources to make Gutenprint better for Linux and 
other Free Software platforms.. it's worth considering.

Thoughts?

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy			       pizza at shaftnet dot org
Coconut Creek, FL                          ^^ (email/xmpp) ^^
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.