[Foomatic] Driver maintainers?

[Grant Taylor]

Till Kamppeter <till.kamppeter at gmx.net> writes:

> For me it looks like that there are several problems:

> Printing in general

This problem is certainly outside the scope of our website (the
original point of discussion); it is a development and/or integration
problem.

I'm not sure who has both the incentive and resources to fix it, nor
am I even sure how to define "fixed".  Somehow, with printing, one
man's fix is so often another man's bug.


> The linuxprinting.org web site

> 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.

I have no problem at all with using a transactional database as such;
Foomatic ran on Postgres for ages.

I do have a problem with PHP.  It's a security disaster by itself;
adding on any of the usual overblown forum packages adds another layer
of security holes.

If the forums are getting too spammy, we can always turn off the email
list interface, or the nntp interface, and/or the web forum interface.
Unfortunately as I recall we've had spam introduced from all sides (!).

Conversely, if the current web interface has bugs, awkwardnesses, or
cosmetic issues, that's easy to fix, too.  Just pipe up and I'll fix
them.


> 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.

I do have the proper program floating around, so it's not hard to take
prose pages from the site and "wikify" them.

I'd prefer to do this *after* first pruning the prose pages down to a
nice trim starting point.  Perhaps this weekend I'll make another pass
(you'll recall I gutted/merged the faqs a while back; same sort of
thing).


> 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.

You're one to talk, I seem to recall that you entered fully half of
them ;)

> edit_printer.cgi

Yes, this I agree we really do need, at the very least for adding new
printers.  I'll have to smoke over the technical details of merging
user contributions into the formal database; what's needed is a
foomatic-aware semantic data merge, not a traditional text merge or
the like.  Slightly subtle...


>> Hmm.  Try changing the alignment with the alignment adjusting page.

Till, do you have any further align.ps tips for this poor fellow
before we start mucking about with the offsets in the driver?  It's
not entirely obvious if gs took his settings or not...

-- 
Grant Taylor
Embedded Linux Consultant
http://www.picante.com/