[Foomatic] Driver maintainers?

Till Kamppeter till.kamppeter at gmx.net
Wed Oct 13 15:30:09 PDT 2004


Now I am back from my three weeks of vacation and wedding in Brazil and 
I have read this thread. And I have also read this posting:

http://linuxprinting.org/forums.cgi?group=linuxprinting.general;article=5623

For me it looks like that there are several problems:

Printing in general
-------------------

- At first, the printing infrastructure in free software is much too 
complicated. For scanning for example all drivers are SANE drivers, most 
of them are even in the sane-backends package. For printing there are 
many different spooler and driver concepts, Foomatic is somehow plugged 
between the spooler and the driver so that they work together. Another 
problem is that applications use completely different methods for screen 
output (X) and for printer output (PostScript).

- Printer drivers do not have a clean way to shut down a print job when 
the user kills it while it is already printing. Under CUPS for example 
often a job is finished even if it was killed.

- foomatic-rip contains a lot of stuff which is missing on the driver 
and spooler side, as file conversion, per-page option setting changing, 
tray selection for PCL lasers (in reality Perl hack in Foomatic data), 
unified options (Duplex, PrintoutMode, ...), common interface for all 
drivers, handling of default settings and user-specified settings.

- Foomatic connects modern spoolers with a big base of unmaintained or 
badly maintained driver code. Without Foomatic the code would get lost 
and the old printers unsupported. Best would be if this code is somehow 
better integrated (CUPS drivers? IJS drivers? ...).

The linuxprinting.org web site
------------------------------

- The newsgroups/mailing lists were audited and the most interesting 
questions and answers extracted by Torsten Howard. He disappeared.

- A forum, like phpBB, is perhaps more attractive to users who want to 
discuss problems than newsgroups/mailing lists. A forum is also immune 
against spam and older postings are much easier to find. Disadvantage is 
that it uses SQL which Grant does not like very much.

- Replacing the static content by a Wiki makes changes easier both for 
admins and for visitors. There is a lot to update where we didn´t find 
the time for. This could also be a model to maintain HOWTO-like 
documentation.

- There should be more user interaction, most printers were entered by 
users via the web interface, this brought us 600 printers with very low 
work effort. A sample input form is in the CVS of lporg-site and can be 
accessed via the URL

http://www.linuxprinting.org/edit_printer.cgi

it does not save the data anywhere yet, I think the best way is to save 
the generated XML Wiki-like and to list all user-entered records not yet 
in the foomatic-db CVS somewhere. Users could display them and click an 
"Edit" button to edit them in the same input form (for corrections). 
 From time to time we will tranfer them into CVS (by a script) when they 
look reasonable for us. In the normal databse browsing it would be 
interesting to turn on and off printer entries which are not in CVS 
(approved by us) yet. There could even be an "Edit" button in the 
printer entries which are already in CVS, so users can apply 
corrections, the correction get into the new printers Wiki, and if we 
accept them, we can get them into CVS by one click.

WDYT?

    Till



Grant Taylor wrote:
> Stian Sletner <stian at sletner.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>At an earlier visit, I considered adding something, but what I really
>>wanted to change was the "works Perfectly" status. :)  Now that I'm
>>starting to understand what a PPD file is, and where Ghostscript fits
>>in, and such, the database does begin to make more sense.
> 
> 
> The full database content was web-editable for several years.  The
> result convinced me that the "edited" approach yields a higher overall
> data quality.  Obviously it's bad if we get behind on the editing, but
> IMHO increasingly stale data is not as bad as increasingly erronious
> data.
> 
> But the core problem is that entirely too much emphasis is given to
> the score.  People buy printers based on it, or give up for good;
> neither of these actions should be taken on the strength of scores
> alone.
> 
> 
>>Sounds good, but great care should be taken when linking this together
>>with the database and the rest of the site.  One thing is having all the
>>information available, another is to present it such that it gives a
>>natural path of learning (for those who are digging around the site),
>>attempting to answer the questions as they invariably come up, perhaps
>>keeping a short intro to each concept apart from the deeper
>>documentation, etc.
> 
> 
> So you suggest more a combination of pruning/reorganizing,
> navigational improvements, a single highly visible toplevel overview
> of how stuff works, and assorted detail closer to the support data
> itself?
> 
> 
>>Not aesthetics, really.  It has more to do with usability, how it's
>>all stitched together.  In what format the communication happens,
>>the perceived "distance" between various fora, the threshold for
>>participation and the level of comfort with which such participation
>>takes place.  
> 
> 
> Hmm.  There are a potentially bewildering number of parallel things -
> the wikish user comment space, the many forums, etc.
> 
> 
>>All right.  I think I might have explained the problem clumsily.  What
>>seems to happen isn't that something is left out, or scaled wrong, but
>>rather that the whole thing is shifted upwards.  I took a picture of a
>>CUPS test page to avoid all confusion:
>>
>>http://home.powertech.no/sletner/testpage.jpg
> 
> 
> Hmm.  Try changing the alignment with the alignment adjusting page.
> Try step 6 from the cups quickstart:
> http://www.linuxprinting.org/cups-doc.html
> 



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