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Date:      Sun, 25 Jun 2000 16:30:41 -0400
From:      Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
To:        Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
Cc:        Nik Clayton <nik@FreeBSD.ORG>, arch@FreeBSD.ORG, papowell@astart.com
Subject:   Re: Bringing LPRng into FreeBSD?
Message-ID:  <v0421010eb57c174d0523@[128.113.24.47]>
In-Reply-To: <200006240653.AAA02110@harmony.village.org>
References:  <v04210105b5794242a6dc@[128.113.24.47]>  <20000621221636.A4137@kilt.nothing-going-on.org> <200006240653.AAA02110@harmony.village.org>

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At 12:53 AM -0600 6/24/00, Warner Losh wrote:
>Garance A Drosihn writes:
>: Given that it is like pulling teeth to get anyone to add an
>: update to our current version of lpr, I suppose this is a
>: good thing.  I have written multiple updates to freebsd's
>: lpr over the past year and a half, and I think I am averaging
>: about six months between the time I send in a patch and the
>: time it is applied.
>
>I'm partially to blame for that.  I find lpr/lpd hard to audit
>and changes to it hard to ensure verify.  This is more a
>reflection of lpr/lpd and not on Garance.

Well, I'm not looking to assign blame.  I'm just expressing
frustration with "the way things are" wrt lpr.  By that I
mean that freebsd's lpd/lpr is pretty important to me, as I
run it on a few hundred hosts with nearly two hundred print
queues funneling jobs to five or six print servers.  For the
things I use it for, my testing is pretty extensive --- except
for the "tiny little" caveat that almost all of my hosts are
NOT running freebsd...  (they are aix, solaris, irix)

At the same time that it's pretty important to me, it's
obvious that it isn't quite as important to most freebsd
users.  That's no one's "fault", that's "just the way it is".
And given how much is happening in freebsd right now (with
BSDI code merger, SMP developments, etc), it's hard to argue
that committers should drop what they are doing for some area
of the system which is not in that mainstream of activity.
This is particularly true given that the faster any updates
are applied, the faster my next set of updates will appear.

Similarly, I would agitate to become a committer just for
lpr and friends, but I don't work enough with *freebsd* to
feel comfortable with that.  Sometime soon I should have
more free time, but right now I simply can not keep up with
'current', and it seems that is what I should be doing if
I want to have my fingers in the middle of the system.  That
isn't anyone's fault either, it's "just the way it is".

Perhaps moving lpr into a port would help, as well as making
it easier for people to use lprNG if they wanted to.


---
Garance Alistair Drosehn           =   gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer          or  drosih@rpi.edu
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute


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