Hello John Layt, very many thanks for your explanation! It helps so much to better understand the whole issue. On May 17 20:56 John Layt wrote (excerpt):
KDEPrint in KDE3 was basically unmaintained for about 1-2 years so no-one worked on porting it to KDE4. About 2 weeks out from release of 4.0 we realised this was the case and tried to fix it.
From my point of view it looks as if "everyone" expects that
I can confirm that printing in general does not get sufficient attention, otherwise printing related issues would be noted much earlier so that such issues could be fixed in time. This is not a problem of KDE. This is a general problem. printing "just works" but "nobody" contributes to it. (Of course there are exceptions.)
It's not that we don't care, or that we enjoy inflicting sub-standard solutions on users, it's simply that in the 3 years since 4.0 not one single other person has stepped forward to help, leaving it to someone completely lacking in the required skills to muddle through, i.e. me when I find time and motivation. If this stuff was easy it would have been done ages ago. Qt for example had to hire in a number of consultants to write parts of their printing code as they didn't have the required skills either. It's not something people work on for the fun of it. ... KDE and OpenPrinting have been talking about the CPD for several years now, and only now is it getting near the point where it may be a viable option in the next 12 months. I attended the OpenPrinting summit this year to discuss how to move the CPD forward and get it into the various toolkits. Unfortunately there is a lack of skilled manpower and funding to get this done at OpenPrinting as well. Discussions are ongoing, especially around whether we can get it integrated into Qt as part of Qt5 and OpenGov which is where it would ideally belong, and trying to find more government funding to get it finished.
Unfortunately I was not able to attend the OpenPrinting summit. Printing in general does not get sufficient attention, otherwise it would be possible to fund a travel from Germany to San Francisco. Why spend money for something unimportant as printing? Last time I was there was in Montreal 2007. At that time Cristian Tibirna talked about KDEPrint. In particular he talked about missing manpower for KDE Printing. His slides are still available at https://www.linuxfoundation.org/images/2/2b/Kde-printing-summit-2007.pdf Therein he also mentioned things like - "Printing for KDE4 severely lagging", - "lack of manpower" - "very short time for implementation" - "KDE Printing is no more in acceptable shape" - "Acute lack of manpower" Was there perhaps a discussion on the OpenPrinting summit this year why it is so terrible to implement printing stuff that nobody likes to contribute for the fun of it? Is there perhaps something missing or broken by design in the base printing system (e.g. CUPS, Ghostscript, whatever...) or in the base system (e.g. X11, dbus, kernel, whatever...) which makes implementing printing stuff such a nightmare? Kind Regards Johannes Meixner -- SUSE LINUX Products GmbH -- Maxfeldstrasse 5 -- 90409 Nuernberg -- Germany HRB 16746 (AG Nuernberg) GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendoerffer -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org