[Foomatic] Driver maintainers?

Stian Sletner stian at sletner.com
Tue Oct 12 01:21:48 PDT 2004


Hello.

I'm writing this mail in rather a frustrated state of mind.  Let me
first of all come right out and admit that I don't know quite where to
turn.  I apologize for bugging possibly the wrong forum, but I sure
would appreciate some hints anyway.

I have an old HP LaserJet IIP which works perfectly, and I'll be damned
if I'll throw away something fully functional over a small problem like
this.  The problem at hand is that there's a bug *somewhere* in the
complex chain of events that constitutes printing from Linux nowadays,
but I have trouble finding out where.  The particular problem is
described in this post I sent to the hp-list four months ago:

http://www.linuxprinting.org/pipermail/hp-list/2004q2/005234.html

It went unanswered just like all previous descriptions of this problem
by other people, that I could find.  It makes me kind of sad to observe
that most of the questions and bug reports around linuxprinting.org go
unanswered, owing no doubt to the inherent complexity of this domain,
but also, I think, to the somewhat opaque and confusing structure of the
linuxprinting.org site and other resources on *nix printing.  Possibly,
the only people who can accurately answer these questions are the people
who wrote the drivers, and in the case of my old printer, they are
probably long gone, and in the case of newer printers, I'm sure they
don't have the capacity to follow everything up.

Some "rot" of old drivers is to be expected as older devices go out of
use, I realize that.  But I can't help thinking (with all due respect)
that there may be something to be gained from a more transparent system,
maybe with clearly defined maintainers for each driver, or some such --
because I'm sure I'm not the first dunce to be overwhelmed and give up
when faced with this type of problem (I think this is my fourth attempt
to find a solution to this).

As for my specific problem, I'm going to ask just this before giving up
again. :)  Is it worth looking into?  Is it _probably_ an easy fix
somewhere?  Are there any chances of getting any assistance, maybe from
some place I've not thought of looking?  What frustrates me is that it
seems like such a small bug, but I just have no idea how to get at it.

Thanks for your time.

-- 
Stian Sletner




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