On Wednesday 18 May 2011 10:17:39 Johannes Meixner wrote:
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?
It was a topic that was discussed, and the general conclusion was that it's just something that you need to pay people to work on. It's yet another reason while I still want to keep printing support upstream in Qt because there is some commercial incentive to at least not break things, even if recently Nokia couldn't be bothered funding bug-fixing due to their mistaken belief no-one wants to print from mobiles. As Qt's focus returns to desktops and tablets hopefully we'll see their interest return.
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?
There's certainly been a lot of problems in the stack in the past, or rather in the 3 or 4 competing stacks, but that's all over now and we're actually in a very good state and able to produce very high quality results. The fact that Apple purchased Cups to use in OSX says a lot. But most people view printing as in a "good-enough" state. The average FOSS developer doesn't have to support an office full of people printing documents so don't see the problems that need solving. Most FOSS devs are also drawn to the latest cool thing, and we are in the age of the paperless office, so who needs printing right??? And it's just hard to get right at times. Cheers! John. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org