Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 21:09:27 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com>, Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@uunet.co.za> Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG, papowell@astart.com Subject: Re: was: Bringing LPRng into FreeBSD? Message-ID: <v04210117b57da3be2cba@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <3957E278.D3B38F54@softweyr.com> References: <31805.962037817@axl.ops.uunet.co.za> <3957E278.D3B38F54@softweyr.com>
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At 5:08 PM -0600 6/26/00, Wes Peters wrote: >Sheldon Hearn wrote: > > > > My only concern is that we lose through incompatibility with > > previous releases what we gain in maintenance. > > > > Of course, I'm one of the people that isn't affected by this. > > I'm just worried about the "replacement bandwagon" that seems > > to be gathering momentum. [...] > >We're in the same boat here. I'm a very lightweight user of lpr, >but also worry about replacement "because it's cool" rather than >replacement because it really needs to be replaced. > >OTOH, I'm the first to agree that lpr is an arcane pile of bits. >I wonder if we shouldn't hold out for something even more up-to-date >than LPRng. Rather than going with an LPR system that sucks less, >perhaps a really good queuing system that knows how to feed printers, >handles print and graphics files formats automagically, and is >configured through a simple web interface? Well, lprNG does offer some of that, though not the 'simple web interface' for configuring. Part of the problem for that goal is that the printers themselves have all kinds of annoying quirks. The current code for freebsd's lpr is actually cleaned up quite a bit from a few years ago. Still a bit arcane and poorly structured, but improving. I tend to prefer gradual cleanup like this to starting some brand new printing project with all kinds of grand goals. If anyone is uneasy about switching to lprNG, they'd have to be even more uneasy about a complete printing rewrite which loses all trace of past history. --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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