[Sussex] Argos Catalogue surprise

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

Nicholas Butler wrote:
>
>>>  
>> Eric Raymond seems to agree with you, but I think it's a user 
>> interface problem, not an underlying technology one now that CUPS has 
>> become more stable. Look at 
>> http://catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html for his famous rant on 
>> this. I seem to be the only one who suggested additional open source 
>> guidelines, rather than merely agreeing with his rant.
> That the article was written in  April of this year is more 
> interesting.As geeks do have a tendency to point to Blogs and articles 
> which  can affirm an argument because we are looking for evidence of a 
> similar position. I guess though that in this case the development of 
> CUPS  may well have been spurred on by this and other comments because 
> those experiences whilst real may not now be relevant.  It would be 
> interesting to find  what ESR feels about CUPS today.  This does go to 
> a point that is quite common in mankind, bad experiences  mean ideas 
> will be constantly discounted or rejected. On the basis that "oh it 
> was crap last year" or "not possible a few years back" we  make  
> decisions about positions or ideas for now. That is not a BAD thing 
> except where things change and move ON I guess such as in th case of 
> Open Source development. Now this is not a pop back , opposing 
> position to Nico, I just realised something about how I view the 
> discussions and read the information and make a descicion, so thanks 
> Nico.
Umm. Nicholas? That date in the top right corner is misleading, that 
seems to represent when it was last updated. The article was written 
early in 2004, which leads to another example of confusing open source 
interface design.

The problems of the CUPS interface don't seem to have changed much since 
then. The CUPS provided web GUI has not improved noticeably, but a 
number of vendors have added noticeable improvements to their 
distribution-specific tools, apparently with this article in mind. The 
system-config-printer tool from RedHat was already pretty good, and has 
had some useful changes made, and YaST has allegedly gotten better 
although it's difficult to imagine how it could have gotten worse.

It is nice to see consumer grade printers specifically mentioning Linux 
as being supported, though.