Hi all,
( This message is BCC'ed to the maintainers of various printing-related
packages trough the $package@packages.qa.debian.org so if you got it, it's
probably worth a read for you. Please followup on debian-printing@l.d.o .)
Now that the Debian freeze for Wheezy is approaching; now that Ubuntu Oneiric
just got released (and hence a new development period is ahead), I think it's
high time to take a step back a take a look at the big picture of the Debian
printing stack(s) (and it's incarnation in its derivatives, amongst which
Ubuntu is important as the Debian Printing Team already incorporates members
of both communities \o/ ).
The current state IMHO suffers from multiple flaws, that I tried to describe
(and possibly address) on a wiki page under the "Printing Team" namespace:
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Printing/RethinkingTheStack
In short, I might summarise the issues list (as I see it) as following:
* The printing stack seems more and more cups-specific (think pyppd-)
compression in /usr/lib/cups/driver, etc). About that I would like to hear
opinions of non-Cups print spoolers maintainers: is that true, is that a
problem?
* There is no consistent naming across drivers, printer databases, spoolers,
etc, leading to a namespace chaos.
* Dependencies don't seem consistent (see the wikipage).
* The "print-server" task (from tasksel) doesn't seem consistent it what it
wants and what root-packages (root as in the root of the dependencies tree) it
pulls in. Similarly, there is no single root-package like "I want a functional
print spooler with the printers database and all possible drivers" (print-
server-{cups,gnuspool} could be that e.g.).
The wikipage tries to describe those problems and propose specific actions and
a plan; all of it is up for discussion and I would like to have a nice and
sound discussion with all parties involved in the maintainance of the Debian
printing stack (them acting in Debian directly or in any derivatives).
Then, what do you think ?
Cheers,
Didier Raboud, aka OdyX
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