[Foomatic] Driver maintainers?

Stian Sletner stian at sletner.com
Tue Oct 12 19:58:38 PDT 2004


First, let me thank you so much for answering my rant in such an
understanding manner.

* At 2004-10-12T17:12-0400, Grant Taylor wrote:
:
| Hmm.  Opaque and confusing I can maybe fix; what was most confusing?

I think the main problem for the end user is that there's a wealth of
information, but it's hard to see what's appropriate.  Some Linux user
coming to linuxprinting.org to find out something about his printer
driver will get mightily confused about which driver and spool system
he's using, and where the driver is located, and what the latest version
is, and who develops it, and where the actual source for it is, and...
and...  It's just hard to find out how it's all pieced together, and
it's probably hard to explain, too.  So I'm not really criticising, but
perhaps suggesting that there could be a way to organise such a resource
in a way that makes it more inviting to the uninitiated.

| The problem of questions going unanswered I don't know how to solve.
| It is the classical problem of self-help forums; nobody who knows the
| answers cares to hang out in a place full of questions.  In our case,
| the problem is made worse because we get few repeat visitors.  People
| just want to know what driver to use or whatever, and then they're
| gone again, never to return.

The key here is to make the surroundings such that a community would
thrive.  I think that the "feel" of the systems employed does have quite
a large impact on the tendency of people to stick around.  Make it so
that people like it there, and they'll keep going there.  I'm sorry if
I'm being vague, I don't really know what kind of actual improvements
would be successful;  maybe a more full-featured forums system, maybe
making the whole place a big wiki, maybe fostering IRC channels and
such...

I just don't think anyone gets that warm, cozy community feeling the way
it is now. :)

| Exactly correct.  Most drivers - even the good ones, that work well
| and have active developers - are effectively unsupported.  Any
| programmer can theoretically figure out any driver and fix problems,
| but there is often no reason for anybody to do so.  I occasionally do
| driver work as a side effect of consulting gigs, a number of more or
| less random drivers have gotten "tune-ups" that way.  I am not the
| only one; patches occasionally appear from all over and get rolled
| into the distributions.

Well, I am trying to look into it myself, but the problems described
above apply.  I ended up running strace -ff on CUPS to find out exactly
how the process went, but I got sort of stuck trying to follow the
thread in the mess that is foomatic-rip. :)

| If there's a maintainer web page for a driver, we do link to it.  The
| "ljet2p" driver is one of the old unmaintained ones, and probably
| points to ghostscript.com or the moral equivalent.  This is of course
| not very useful...

Indeed.

| If the runtime alignment options don't address the issue, then it
| might be either a imageable area misdefinition in the PPD file (are
| you using a PPD-aware application to print?), or more likely it's a
| misdefine in the driver source code itself.  A third possibility is
| that it is a physical limitation of the mechanism that is correctly
| handled in the driver, although I assume you've verified this
| possibility against some other driver's output?

I use CUPS so I assume the answer to the first question is yes, and I've
examined the PPD file quite thoroughly already.  To my untrained eye, it
looks ok.  The A4 values all match up, etc.

Let me come right out and ask the stupid question; where _is_ the
source for this driver?

The third point I don't really understand.  If you mean the printer does
this by itself, I don't think so, I used to work fine under Windows.  It
also prints plain text ok if sent directly to it.

Thanks again for answering, I really appreciate it.

-- 
Stian Sletner




More information about the Printing-foomatic mailing list