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

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

> Sorry, I am very late in this discussion but to be honest I did not 
> quite understand what was expected from me...

No more than you wish to contribute.  Gimp-print is still very much in
development.  Getting it into potato is out of the question.  It would be
a nice addition to woody, though.

> Interesting. May I ask what the gimp-print plugin provides to the 
> application and to the user?

The name "gimp-print" is really misleading at this time.  It began as
a plug-in for the Gimp and it still bears that name, but, in general it is
a high quality suite of printer drivers which includes support for printers
made by Epson, HP, and Canon at this time.  It includes support for printers
which contain 6 or 7 inks and are capable of multiple ink droplet sizes.
No other gs drivers can do that at this time, AFAIK.

It is currently usable in two forms, either as a plug-in for the gimp, which
will allow the Gimp to print directly to the printer bypassing ghostscript
or other printer filters, or as a ghost script driver.  (The ghostscript
driver currently supports only Epson printers at this time, although there's
no real reason for that other than lack of manpower.)

> While the context is not clear to me I can explain why I have such a big
> .diff.gz. The reason is quite simple actually - the Debian gs package 
> includes a lot of contributed drivers as well as kanji support. This sums
> up to about 2.7MB unpacked...

Yes, I understand that now.

> So gimp-print needs a driver in ghostscript? I don't see the problem, 
> it's just another driver for me to add to the Debian package. Or am I 
> missing something?

No, you're not missing anything.  In fact, I have a script in CVS now which
will apt-get source gs and libjpeg, apply a patch, to the source, and then
build a new gs package with the driver installed.  If you would like to
include this patch in the official Debian woody release of gs, that would be
great.

Can you take a look at what I've done?  The project website is available
at http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net and instructions for accessing the
CVS tree are there.  There's a script called make-deb.sh which does
everything.

> I guess using the AFPL for gimp-print is out of question. OTOH you could 
> distribute the driver for ghostscript under a dual license so that the user
> can select between the AFPL and GPL for that driver. 

As far as I know Robert is committed to remaining GPL.  That's my preference
as well, but, I'll defer to his judgement on this point.  I think we'll need
to be in Gnu Ghostscript and Gnu Ghostscript only.

Eric