Re: [Gimp-print-devel] packaging or: trying to break bogus MS patents

[<sh...@al...>]

(Quick review for Ben and Torsten: We're discussing how to package
Gimp's print plug-in for Debian.  Gimp-print is trying to separate
itself from the Gimp and become a generalized printer driver package.
It currently works from within Ghostscript as well as from the Gimp.)

> I thought I put everything in there (except a 1 MB
> gs-aladdin_5.50-8.diff file -- should that be in there?)

Hmm.  Possibly, but I'm not sure what's in it.  I'm surprised it's that
long.  Can you put a copy of it somewhere where I can grab it and then
I'll take a look at it and decide if it needs to be included or not.
It may be better to include a script which can generate such a file,
but I'd still like to get a copy of it to see what he's done.

I'm not really sure how gimp-print should be packaged in the first place.
Debian already includes gimp-print as part of the main gimp package and
ghostscript is also available as a separate package.

I think gimp-print will need to be removed from the official debian
gimp package and separated into its own package.  This is not so hard
to do.

Unfortunately, ghostscript is not as easy to handle.  Since there is no
plug-in architecture, and the gimp-print driver must be actually compiled
into ghostscript, I think the only way to optionally provide gimp-print
at this time would be to have alternative ghostscript packages.

There are also legal issues involved with making a gs-aladdin-gimp-print
package.  I don't think such a beast could be legally distributed.
Using gnu ghostscript should work, though, and has no licensing problems.
Anyone care to comment on that?

Eric