Re: request for volunteers: xfree86 woody, xfree86 sarge, and xorg-x11 uploaders
On Mon, 2005-04-25 at 20:03 -0700, Keith Packard wrote:
>
> For myself, I consider Xprint a legacy solution to support applications
> which require it but to push future application development to the cairo
> +CUPS model which provides a modern drawing model, wider text layout
> support and better printer interaction based on the nearly universally
> (OS X, Windows, Linux) supported IPP printer protocol.
>
Yes, Cairo looks nice. I hope it gets beyond the "glacially slow"
performance this side of Etch's release.
With regards to IPP support, this sort of thing has been requested for
Xprint too, and I've started looking into doing that. Would you agree
that Cairo should be engineered to support the Free Software Group's new
OpenPrinting API (PAPI)? It's a superset of IPP, allowing support, for
instance, for LPD systems if CUPS happens to not be used.
> With announcements like last weeks cairo-based Mozilla port, and the
> plans to migrate Gtk+ to the cairo API,
It will be interesting to see these developments in action.
> >
> > The curious thing here with regard to Xprint, is that upstream has been
> > holding discussions with other X.org hackers over whether Xprint runs
> > best as a stand-alone server, or whether a unified print+display server
> > is a better idea. There are 3 alternatives:
> > 1) separate servers (the current situation)
> > 2) unified server run separate on different displays (one for video, one for print)
> > 3) unified server, just the one running which handles both video and print requests.
>
> Running a unified display/print service in the same address space seems
> foolish to me; the display server requires tremendous priviledge while
> the Xprint server communicates with many external applications and
> should run with as limited a priviledge as possible. This argues
> strongly for separate processes. Xprint also requires code inside the X
> server which is not needed by a display server, making it unreasonable
> to try to support both functions from the same binary images, which
> indicates that we should use separate programs as well.
>
Your reasoning basically makes sense to me. I'm not really in a position
to argue for or against the unified server, but those who want to know
more can check the xprint and xorg archives, see
http://xprint.mozdev.org/pipermail/xprint/index.html (March and April)
or
http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-arch/
http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-modular/
Specific threads include:
http://xprint.mozdev.org/pipermail/xprint/2005-March/000428.html
http://xprint.mozdev.org/pipermail/xprint/2005-April/thread.html
http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-arch/2005-March/000008.html
http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-modular/2005-March/000004.html
http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-modular/2005-April/000073.html
(some of the same thread was cross-posted over the three mailing lists).
> I would like to see a world where no Xprint packages needed to be loaded
> on a machine which didn't have any Xprint services running.
Yes, I think that is reasonable.
Drew
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