Re: [Gimp-print-devel] RFC: New release and abandoning MacOS?

[Matt B. <wal...@ma...>]

> On Jun 27, 2023, at 12:03 PM, Solomon Peachy via Gimp-print-devel <gim...@li...> wrote:
> 
> I'd _really_ like to see a proper, full release go out; I'm still 
> getting bug/support issues about 5.3.3, which is the last release we 
> actually announced... nearly four years ago.  While we did cut a 5.3.4 
> tarball, we never announced it to the world, holding back due to the
> lack of a sane/working MacOS installer.
> 
> In the subequent 2.5 years, things are even worse today on the MacOS 
> front, as Apple has continuted to iterate on their platform vision in a
> way we've just not been able to keep up with.
> 
> Meanwhile, there have been more printer additions and even more 
> bugfixes, and I think it's past the time we cut a new release so maybe 
> our first answer to nearly every support request won't be "uninstall 
> whatever you got from your distro and compile Gutenprint maually"
> 
> Additionally, since we can't meaningfully support MacOS at all any more, 
> IMO it makes more sense to just walk away from it entirely.  Once we get 
> a "Gutenprint Printer Application" working for the brave new 
> IPP-Everywhere paradigm, we can revisit releasing that for MacOS if it 
> still makes sense to do so.
> 
> Thoughts?  

By all means, go forward.  Not having an active maintainer for macOS shouldn't hold up progress on other fronts. 

I am not sure I know all of the macOS issues or how difficult it would be to accomodate them.  I do know that the v5.3.x macOS releases are a show stopper for printers that can print on CDs or DVDs. No Printer Features can be seen in the GUI.  Even trying to see the Printer Features will crash some applications. PPDs can be modified to resolve this issue.  Alternatively, genppd.c can be modified.  I have a modified genppd.c we used for testing that fixes the issue.

I'm not sure what label you should put on the Mac platform.  Suspended/inactive or currently unsupported might work.  Perhaps it will generate some inquiries and lead to returning to an active maintainer status.

Matt