[Gimp-print-devel] Re: feature-request gimp-print

[Robert L K. <rl...@al...>]

(please cc all messages to gimp-print-devel)

   Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2000 10:10:29 +0200
   From: Joern Clausen <jc...@ge...>

   The main point is: I don't want a user to select a combination of printer
   and driver (and possible media), because our users won't be able to
   do this. I'd have to give them a pre-configured setup, where they can
   eventually make changes, but they have to have a working startpoint.

OK.

   > The current way that printers are handled (the plugin runs lpc or
   > whatever to find out what printers are on the system) is a complete
   > botch.  We're looking at other ways of handling this.

   Er, it's a bit slow, but it's probably a good solution. I don't like
   unportable solutions (like parsing /etc/printcap) or maintaining another
   list of available printers. OK, if I have to keep a list of all printers
   with associated PPDs and other configs, that's acceptable.

Well, it's not a terribly portable solution either.  We've already
seen complaints about not parsing lpstat output correctly, and that
the command used actually does a full status of every printer, which
is horribly slow when there are 50 network-connected printers.

   >  We've been
   > thinking in terms of having no auto-discovery, and users can define
   > their own printers.

   Again, please consider dumb user, which are totaly unable to configure
   such things on their own, and who rely on their sys-admin to prepare
   a working configuration.

OK, that's a fair issue.  So perhaps we need to find a way to merge a
printer list defined by the system administrator into the user's
printer list.

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rl...@al...>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lp...@uu...
Project lead for The Gimp Print --  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
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