Re: Gtk+ printing dialog highlevel thoughts

[Michael Sweet <mike easysw com>]

John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 20:07 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
>
> > Another important feature that the generic API has to support is
> > some form of printing feedback (spinning icon while printing) and job
> > cancellation support.
>
> We do this in Fedora/RHEL right now with D-Bus patches to CUPS which
> polls job states and broadcasts signals for local printers.  For remote
> printers eggcups polls directly.  It is not the best.  CUPS 1.2 has
> notification support where we can write a notifier to propagate the
> events over D-Bus.  We might need to write a remote notifier also. Does
> CUPS 1.2 have notifiers that will propagate to a local cups notifier?

Not directly, however job and printer state changes *are* reflected
locally so you probably don't need it.

There was an "ippnotify" notification scheme that was drafted in the
PWG that would do the job, but the spec got pulled.  Perhaps we can
revisit that (but it wouldn't be in the CUPS 1.2 timeframe)

Let's make sure we spend some time at the Printing Summit on this
so we can come up with the exact requirements...

> Eggcups right now handles job cancellation and showing state changes. 

It would be nice to convert eggcups into a lightweight monitor app;
CUPS 1.2 adds an "authenticate-job" operation and corresponding
notification event, so it will be possible to support proxy
authentication without running a separate user-session cupsd...

> The biggest problem with relying on 1.2 is that it is not out yet.
> Michael, excuse me if you answered this in another e-mail, but do you
> know the time frame?  I'm going to get the sources and play around with
> it a bit.  Perhaps I can take what we have got and move the API closer
> to what we will have in the future.

CUPS 1.2 betas will appear in two more weeks (really!)  I am spending
next week at Apple in Cupertino to integrate the rest of the OSX-
specific bits.  I am also planning on merging our own version of the
Red Hat DBUS changes (using the new event hooks in the scheduler) so
that CUPS 1.2 sends the proper messages through DBUS - I'll have
those commited to the public repo after my meeting with Apple (they
have their own kernel notification API very much like DBUS...)

--
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Document Software          http://www.easysw.com