Re: Grand Unified Printing

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Fri, Oct 15, 2004 at 12:03:24PM -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> 
> The general thought seemed to be that we should create a new CVS module.
> I half-jokingly suggested calling it gup, for Grand Unified Printing,
> but people seemed to like it.  However the gup is also the abbreviation
> for the GNOME Usability Project, but they don't have a CVS module.  Do
> we care about this?

How about 'gups' which makes for a cute play on cups while we're at
it.
 
> Let's assume for now we call it gup.  On a high level, I think the
> functionality we want is a merger of eggcups, hal-cups-utils, and gnome-
> cups-manager's gnome-cups-add/libgnomecupsui.
Agreed.

> Now, eggcups is really an agglomeration of two major things: print job
> notification and a driver prompt.  The driver part depends on cups-
> config-daemon from hal-cups-utils.  I'd like to separate the
> notification from the driver prompt.
Also agreed.

> Jody brought up a while ago that gnome-cups-add is needed when we can't
> autodetect printers.  The plan is to merge that into an "Add Printer" in
> the print dialog, right?

Yes and no.  gnome-cups-add has basicly boiled down to two widgets
now.
    - driver selector
    - connection selector (eg smb browsing)

The former is simple, but seems like it will continue to get minor
additional heuristics to cleanup/sanitize vendor/model/driver names.

The later has some major changes planned for this development cycle.
We'd like to add more scan capabilities to deal with non-local,
non-cups network printers.

All of this seems best suited to live in gup(s) rather than
libgnomeprintui.  I'd like to drop the gnome-cups-manager icon list
and use libgnomeprintui's printer list, we also already have a half
hearted 'add printer' button in that widget that exec's
gnome-cups-add.

> gup/
>    print-notifier/
>      ec-tray-icon.c ec-job-model.c ec-cups-job-monitor.c ...
>    config-daemon/
>      ec-driver-prompt.c cups-config-daemon.c hal_lpadmin.c
>    libgnomecupsui/
>      gnome-cups-ui-driver.c gnome-cups-permission.c ...
>    gnome-cups-add/
>      add-printer.c ...
> 
> Does that make sense?  Is there anything missing here?  Other thoughts?

It seems like a good plan.  I'd also like to move libgnomecups into
libgnomeprint.  We can install multiple libraries but I don't see
much utility to distinct source packages, they have the same
dependencies.

Tell me when you folk are ready for the next round of development
and we can do a gnomeprint-2.8.1, and branch.