Hi folks,
I'd just like to get your opinion about the packaging of
ijsgutenprint. This is currently packaged as two parts:
ijsgutenprint: the actual IJS server binary
foomatic-db-gutenprint: Foomatic data for ijsgutenprint
Upstream only support the use of ijsgutenprint via Foomatic. We don't
support invocation via gs (though it should work, we don't provide
support for it; the options are too complex, and Foomatic has a
database of all the allowed options).
The Foomatic data may be used to generate a PPD file in order to use
ijsgutenprint with a spooler such as CUPS or LPRng. However, I don't
know quite how many people are choosing to go this route; I recommend
CUPS and cupsys-driver-gutenprint as a better-tested alternative
(though the output is typically identical).
I was considering providing an ijsgutenprint-ppds package with the
PPDs pre-generated, so that using ijsgutenprint is easier for
non-wizards.
* generating the PPD is not intuitive. You have to discover the right
combination of driver and model, for example an Epson C60:
foomatic-ppdfile -d gutenprint-ijs.5.0 -p Epson-Stylus_C60 > epson-c60.ppd
* LPRng users then still have to set up a printcap entry to invoke
foomatic using this PPD.
* Generating a full set of PPDs (currently 732):
foomatic-compiledb gutenprint-ijs.5.0
This takes many hours, even on a very fast system, and the generated
PPDs occupy 104 MiB of disk space (13 MiB gzip -9'd).
I was wanting to do this in the package postinst, but it's clearly
too inefficient to inflict on users. It's not possible to generate
without installing the data, so can't currently be done during the
gutenprint package build (unless foomatic is fixed up to allow an
alternate database).
* The user will only want one or two PPDs out of the 732 generated.
* CUPS users can just use cupsys-driver-gutenprint, but LPR[ng] users
have little help with configuration. apsfilter no longer supports
current gimp-print/gutenprint.
Any thoughts on anything we could do better? I'm particularly
interested what would be most useful for LPRng; CUPS is already well
catered for.
Thanks,
Roger
--
Roger Leigh
Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/
Debian GNU/Linux http://www.debian.org/
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