[Pkg-cups-devel] Re: Debian in the OSDL Printing Summit 2006

[Roger Leigh]

Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh at debian.org> writes:

> Well, it appears that I am going to be one of the very few (if not the only)
> Debian maintainer in the printing summit.  I sure hope at least one other
> Debian maintainer will also attend, but AFAIK so far, none will be able to.
> If anyone else is also going, please email me privately so that we can
> coordinate our talks.

I would have liked to make it, but it's not possible I'm afraid.

> CUPS issues must be related to CUPS 1.2 (it makes no sense to bother with
> 1.1) so please download and try out current CVS/SVN before you raise any
> issues relative to CUPS.
>
> The summit charter is at
> http://groups.osdl.org/workgroups/dtl/desktop_architects/desktop_printing
>
> Issues that come to mind immediately are:
>   PPD organization, l18n structure, auto-generation (related to
>   linuxprinting.org), filesystem hierarchy.

An issue I've got as Gutenprint upstream, but is also applicable
generally is PPD i18n.  We currently use gettext to translate the
PPDs, but this isn't scalable (all PPDs: 182 MiB in size; English
only: 11 MiB).  CUPS 1.2 has some PPD i18n stuff, but I've not looked
at it in detail yet.  I'll do so soon.
- we would probably generate the translated multi-language PPDs on the
  fly as part of our build.
- All the existing static vendor PPDs would also benefit from
  translation, but they aren't using gettext.  Having tools for
  extracting, translating and merging translated PPD options would be
  great (perhaps similar to the gettext tools; this might also be
  catered for by CUPS 1.2; I've not checked yet).

The PPD specs we have been discussing and implementing over the last
few months would do well to be exposed to wider discussion.
Coordination with other distributions, upstream package maintainers
and CUPS upstream here would be very useful.

More generally, is there anything more we can do (in Debian as a
whole) to achieve better integration of all our printing packages,
From the spooler and drivers up through to user applications?
Printing setup in Debian is still rather more difficult than other
distributions, mainly due to flexibility we give the user in their
choice of printing setup.  However, it would be nice to provide a more
nicely integrated default setup (based on CUPS) where the setup is as
automated and simple as possible (i.e. we choose sensible general
defaults), while still allowing custom setups.


Please say Hi to Micheal Sweet and Robert Krawitz from me (CUPS and
Gutenprint).  It would have been really great to meet them in person;
perhaps it might happen next year.


Thanks, and have a great time!
Roger

-- 
Roger Leigh
                Printing on GNU/Linux?  http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/
                Debian GNU/Linux        http://www.debian.org/
                GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848.  Please sign and encrypt your mail.
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