Re: [hpoj-devel] large attachments and name changes

[<pa...@rc...>]

Joe Piolunek wrote:
> RPM's and SRPM's sometimes are a pretty big download. It would be better IMO,
> to put any large files on a web page or ftp site (if you have one) for public
> download, and then announce it in the list. It would mean less work for
> sourceforge's mailservers, and would not require anyone to download a big
> file that they may not have a use for. This is only my own preference, of
> course. Some people may not mind getting big mail attachments.
I would tend to agree.  It didn't really bother me personally, because I've
gotten rather spoiled with my DSL.  :-)  However, for the sake of people
with slower dialup connections it would be good to refrain from sending
large attachments.  I'm sure the Sourceforge people would appreciate that
too, even though they recently upgraded their servers.  (It's good they did,
because now I usually get my messages back within a few minutes, as opposed
to several hours previously.)

Originally the hpoj-devel mailing list was configured to reject postings
larger than about 40K, but I removed that limitation because it was blocking
legitimate postings (in particular, Burkhard's and Damien's SMP and 2.4
patches from several months ago).  I'll keep it that way unless it ends up
getting abused at some point.

Jarl Friis wrote:
> Well, maybe a mailing list shouldn't be filled up with attachments in the
> first place, so I've put them on:
> http://213.237.48.227/~jarl/hpoj/
> 
> It may be down (turned off) some days, approx. every 10th to pick a
> number, I'll put them somewhere more reliable soon.
I just tried it and it doesn't seem to be up (Sat Dec 30 05:21:27 UTC 2000).

> from what I can see RPM is not designed for that feature, in the SPEC file
> part of the src.rpm you specify where to put files, i.e. SuSE put libs in
> /usr/lib/ wheras RedHat puts them in /usr/local/lib
I've been running various versions of RedHat for the last 5 years, and they
have always put libraries in /usr/lib (or /lib for system-level stuff),
even for software which when built directly from source would default to
/usr/local/lib.  In my experience /usr/local generally seems to be reserved
for installing software outside the context of the "official" packaging
system on a given distribution.

> rename Suggestion:
> What about using the name POrTAL (or just 'portal') for the concept now
> know as ptal, POrTAL could be for Peripheral Oriented Transport
> Abstraction Layer or something else with O, or did you get 'ptal' from
> somewhere else? POrTAL is a little bit more pronounceable than ptal.
I pronounce "ptal" by saying the letter 'P' and then saying "tal", resulting
in a very manageable two-syllable word (in other words, "pea-tal").  So I
don't think it's worth the trouble of renaming PTAL (and the API) at this
point, but feel free to pronounce it "portal" if it helps you.

Speaking of name changes, at some point we might need to figure out a new
name for the project itself, since I'm trying to expand beyond just
supporting Linux.  (I already have a user-mode parallel port driver running
on Linux and FreeBSD, which I may make available in the "experimental" section
soon if I get a chance to clean it up a bit.)  I won't change the "hpoj"
abbreviation for the package or Sourceforge project name, but once we've
officially achieved cross-platform status, it might be better to call it
something besides the "HP OfficeJet driver for Linux" or whatever (and I'm
not even consistent about what I call it right now!).  We could just say
"Unix" instead of "Linux", but there might be some trademark-infringement
issues there.  Suggestions would be welcome, but they should somehow reflect
the fact that it's a driver for HP all-in-one peripherals for non-Windows
platforms, and possibly reflect the fact that it's Free software.

David