From kde-core-devel Sat Sep 01 23:13:57 2007 From: Kurt Pfeifle Date: Sat, 01 Sep 2007 23:13:57 +0000 To: kde-core-devel Subject: Re: Requesting feature freeze exemption for Gwenview Message-Id: <46D9F235.5000208 () gmx ! net> X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=118868862926524 Andreas Hartmetz wrote: > About 30% [+/- 40 %] or so of it work as intended and the source, while > apparently structured reasonably well, is just a whole lot of code. This is > why nobody stepped up to fix it, apparently. No, historically even, printing is the "unwanted, unloved child" on all OS platforms. Coding a printing system has always been a one-man show (look at who wrote the old LPR/LPD system, then LPRng, now CUPS...) There must be a reason why you have quite a few of competing browsers, dozens competing music players, video viewers and so on.... Printing is just not "sexy". And once it works, somehow, nobody (new) touches it any more. For a long time. Until it becomes so painful again it turns into unbearable. > It looks just too daunting. > Printing (with all the options and backends) itself is nontrivial, so... Yes, printing is one of the most complicated day to day tasks one can en- counter in IT, for every role: user, administrator, ... coder. Wait... for coders it is not a "day to day" thing. And it *IS* daunting. (That's why even Microsoft was not able to really fix it in their last 15 years). > there > seems to be no way around putting a whole lot of effort into it. And it > doesn't help that most developers are busy getting their own stuff release > ready. > The more obscure parts of KDEPrint didn't even work right in KDE 3, at least > for me. Double sided printing and so on - good luck... I had to use Acrobat > Reader and printing to PDF from there to do this. Funny. Double sided does work reliably, once printing works *at all*. And it is news to me that it would work better from Acroread than from any other application. > So we are, basically, screwed until an experienced developer with enough time > appears out of the blue. There will no-one appear from the blue, I bet. Or are you praying for it? -- Kurt Pfeifle System & Network Printing Consultant ---- Linux/Unix/Windows/Samba/CUPS Infotec Deutschland GmbH ..................... Hedelfinger Strasse 58 A RICOH Company ........................... D-70327 Stuttgart/Germany