[Sussex] Argos Catalogue surprise

[Geoff Teale]

Hi all,

I'm not going to resend all that went before, just my tuppence...

CUPS is an interesting framework, I've developed printer driver within
it (although I haven't done anything in that area for over a year now).
As a driver developer it historically presented you with the following
problems:

1. Front end processing is very simple but didn't provide a mechanism to
feedback information to the user (beyond stderr).
2. Backend processing was much more powerful, but very complex.

Despite this I actually think there is nothing inherently wrong with
CUPS - OS X's printing interfaces seem sane and are also built on top of
CUPS.

Most open source drivers are front end drivers and so are less capable
than they might be otherwise.  I've never developed a drive on OS X so I
don't know if apple provides some higher level programming abstraction
of the printer interfaces than CUPS itself- but this seems likely.  

Open source GUI's fall into two categories - those that only do what you
can already do through the web interface and those that try to control
the /etc/cups files as well.   The first category relies on someone
setting up /etc/cups correctly (which works really well in distributions
that care a lot more about ease of use than security, but that is
obviously a flawed approach), the second category tends to be overly
complex.  Apple get around this by making assumptions about the users
needs - they separate their OS into server and client varieties and
bundle complex groups of setting into the results of high level
questions for end users (this is also an approach Windows uses).  

I'd also point out that printer setup varies massively from distro to
distro and from desktop to desktop.   A product of diversity, clearly.
It's a constant truism that diversity is both the F/L/OSS worlds
greatest strength and it's biggest problem at the same time.  This would
all be a lot better of course if some sensible standards could be agreed
on.



-- 
Geoff Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation