Re: [Gimp-print-devel] Imprimante Epson

[Greg T. <gd...@le...>]

Solomon Peachy <pi...@sh...> writes:

> On Mon, Dec 09, 2019 at 01:59:40PM -0600, Matt Broughton wrote:
>> I think most Mac users would just abandon Gutenprint.  They shout, 
>> curse, and/or ask what the heck are they referring to?  
>
> If moving to macports/homebrew results in something that reduces our 
> support/maintainence burden (eg wider OS platform support, simpler 
> release process, and so forth) that might arguably be a net benefit.

There is also pkgsrc, which is a multi-OS portable packaging system.  I
have been maintaining a gutenprint-lib package, not 100% diligently but
often up to date.

With pkgsrc, there is no notion of creating official mac dmg installers.
There is a foo-1.2.tar.gz "package" which is in pkgsrc format (tarball
with the files that go in /opt/pkg and some control files), and one uses
pkg_add to add that.  From the point of view of the OS this is just
placing programs in the FS.  If even that starts to be restricted, then
I don't see a good path forward.

> Meanwhile, nearly every MacOS release has broken something about 
> Gutenprint or its release/packaging process, and the next version 
> post-Catalina is expected to completely drop support for traditional 
> CUPS drivers altogether, making Gutenprint pretty much useless for Mac 
> users until we manage to build a "printing application" instead.

That seems to be the nature of apple these days.  Not clear if there is
a path to thigns going well.