Ghostscript 9.04
Hi,
the Ghostscript of Ubuntu Oneiric will be 9.04. I have built some
snapshots now and uploaded them into Oneiric.With this I have tested the
new Ghostscript, found some bugs, and got them fixed by the Ghostscript
upstream developers.
In addition, the new Ghostscript has significant performance
improvements when printing (= rendering with high resolutions). Once, an
important performance bug was fixed
(http://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=691755), and second, simply
calling Ghostscript with the "-dNOINTERPOLATE" command line option makes
it much faster. Both issues are addressed in the new Ghostscript version
upstream and I have also added the "-dNOINTERPOLATE" command line option
in all Ghostscript command lines in all printing-related Ubuntu
packages: Foomatic, ghostscript, cups, hplip, gutenprint, foo2zjs,
pxljr, ...
The official release of Ghostscript 9.04 is planned for tomorrow and I
plan to update the Ubuntu package tomorrow or on Monday.
You could take the snapshot package from Ubuntu and load it into
experimental or you can wait for my final release package and put this
into unstable.
You can download the Ubuntu source packages here:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ghostscript/
During the packaging I had one problem. I did not succeed to update
debian/copyright, as no debian/copyright.newhints gets generated. Can
you tell me how to proceed? All new files, including binaries (mainly
ICC profiles) come from the Ghostscript upstream developers and have
license and copyright as the rest of Ghostscript (base/, psi/, ...).
Another point is the delta with Ubuntu. There are the following differences:
1.) debian/ghostscript-cups.postinst: Fixed "lpstat -r" check for the
auto update of PPDs of existing queues. "lpstat -r" exits always
with status 0, we must check the actual output. Call lpstat,
lpadmin, and cupsctl with "-h /var/run/cups/cups.sock" to avoid
querying remote servers set up in /etc/cups/client.conf, and
asking for passwords. Thanks to Martin-Éric Racine for tracking
this down and the solution! See Debian bug #543468. Use signal
names instead of numbers for trap, quiesces a lintian bashism
warning.
2.) debian/ghostscript.preinst: Clean up traces of Ghostscript in
defoma via "defoma-app purge gs", so that when updating packages
which still use defoma no warnings get issued.
3.) debian/ghostscript.preinst: Use Ubuntu version numbers.
4.) gs-common: Reintroduce dependency on ghostscript, still too many
packages assuming gs-common has the binaries.
5.) Really break and replace older ghostscript in libgs9-common.
6.) Apport hook.
(1) and (2) you should really take into the Debian package. (1) makes
sure that the installation of the ghostscript-cups package does not hang
when the user has set a remote CUPS server via client.conf. (2)
eliminates obscure warnings from the installation of other packages.
(3) and (6) you can overtake by surrounding them with "if" clauses so
that things get done the right way depending on whether the package is
built under Debian or Ubuntu. See the handling of the Apport hook in the
cups and hplip packages.
(4) and (5) is dependency stuff. Introducing these dependencies should
not break Debian.
I would be very grateful if we could have identical source packages for
Ghostscript in both Debian and Ubuntu.
Till
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