Head's up: Printing Summit talk at 01:00PM EDT about PPD and i18n
We have scheduled a breakout session in the printing summit about PPD files
and their i18n, and that session will *also* include the PPD filesystem
placement specification.
So you people may want to be online on the summit backchannel at 01:00 PM
EDT (GMT -04:00), freenode (former opn) network, #printing-summit. I will
relay your comments to the people in the summit.
Debian and Mandrake are the only distributions here, but CUPS upstream, KDE
upstream, HPLIP upstream, GhostScript upstream, GutenPrint upstream...
they're all here and listening. LSB was here yesterday, and they're also
interested.
One ****very**** important note: CUPS 1.2 supports dynamic generation of
PPDs through helpers, *and* it tries to find changes in the PPD filesystem
tree every time it needs to look after a PPD. That means it detects changes
instantly, AND that it wastes a great deal of resources if the PPD tree is
big (and it is also probably quite slow if the helpers are slow to provide a
list of the PPDs they can generate).
So, unless CUPS 1.2.x starts using in-kernel file/tree-alteration-monitors,
we do *not* want to symlink the entire /usr/share/ppd inside CUPS anymore,
it would be better to use the dynamic PPD generation stuff to speed things
up. Gutenprint, foomatic and hplip are probably going to want to move to
dynamic generation.
That also means we need a place in /etc and a place in /usr for the PPD
generator helpers (CUPS specific), and a place in /etc for the users to drop
their custom PPDs easily.
A short talk to CUPS upstream suggests we might want to:
1. Not symlink our /usr/share/ppd stuff
2. Symlink /usr/local/share/ppd
3. Symlink /etc/ppd (or wherever)
4. Use a *fast* helper that tells cups of the PPDs installed by the
distribution (i.e. stuff in /usr/share/ppd), and fetches them from
there when needed.
I have also requested a way to keep track of PPD changes (so that we can
have an easier time doing conffile-like PPD updates on upgrade), and it will
probably be available in CUPS 1.3, which should be out in about 6 months.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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