[Printing-architecture] My suggestions for Ira on the LSB meeting

[Till Kamppeter <till.kamppeter@gmx.net>]

Oi,

Ira, as you asked for on the phone on Wednesday I give my suggestions here:

The best would be that a distro to be LSB-certified requires all FSG
OpenPrinting standards to be implemented and included: JTAPI, PAPI, PCM,
OpenPrinting vector, ... (and also a PDF-based printing workflow)

But as long as "apt-get install libjtapi-dev" tells me that the package
does not exist, I think we will not be able to make LSB requiring this.
So I urgently suggest to FSG OpenPrinting to apply as a mentor
organization on the Google Summer of Code 2006
(http://code.google.com/soc/, deadline May 1st, 17:00 pacific). This way
we can perhaps achieve our goal on a later LSB version.

For currently existing software I suggest the following requirements
(Ira, probably you will not like this, but somehow we have to start now):

- CUPS 1.2.0 or newer with

   o Either standard paths (/etc/cups, /usr/lib/cups, /usr/share/cups,
     ...)

        OR

     cups-config in the main CUPS package (not in -devel) for path
     auto-detection

   o Working web interface (no blocking like in Ubuntu, or Digest
     Authentification like in SuSE)

- Foomatic (current CVS of all sub-packages or newer) with

   o Standard paths (/usr/share/foomatic, /usr/bin, ...)

   o On-the-fly building of PPDs with CUPS 1.2 (I added this feature to
     the CVS yesterday)

- GhostScript (ex. current SVN rev of ESP GS or newer) with

   o Standard program and font paths

   o At least the ijs, cups, opvp, pswrite, and pdfwrite
     devices (opvp is OpenPrinting Vector, already available on
     Subversion of ESP GS)

- KDE with

   o CUPS support (compiled against libcups)

   o Patched/fixed to smoothly work with CUPS 1.2 in standard
     configuration

- GTK/GNOME with

   o newest libgtk/Cairo with the new printing support and CUPS-enabled
     dialog

- General

   o All KDE and GNOME applications and also OpenOffice.org have to
     feature a printing dialog which gives access to all printers and
     PPD options. Better even if Firefox and Thunderbird fulfill this,
     too.

WDYT?

   Till