libkdeprint

[Hans Meine]

Am Dienstag, 16. Oktober 2007 15:54:47 schrieb Kurt Pfeifle:
> What implications that has to user-visible interfaces and interaction
> options when printing, I can't gather from that. Hence my many questions
> and postings in the last 6 weeks dealing with these concerns. (But these
> were mostly ignored and left un-answered anyway.)

I think they were not answered because nobody knows yet what KDE4's printing 
system will look like.  But I do not see anyone saying "hey, I don't care 
about it", so I bet that it will eventually be brought in a working state.

> > You must not
> > compare/confuse that with the command line application "kprinter" which
> > we all love so much.
>
> And which will be removed for KDE 4.0. Or not?

I don't think that anyone wants to remove that functionality.  IIRC, someone 
suggested making a PS viewer be able to act like kprinter (i.e. read stuff 
from stdin), which would be even cooler because there could be a preview 
button in kprinter4 (assuming that the default interface would be small and 
lean like kprinter's), which I have missed quite some times.

> > Thomas is (well, was, before you scared him away?) talking about the
> > internals.  He is not the devil that you call him;
>
> C'mon, I didn't call him that. I do wonder if everybody who read my
> mail did see it in the same light?

I do not want to repeat exactly what you said when, but it became quite clear 
that you accused him of a) removing functionality from KDE's printing system, 
because he b) was focused on kword's supposed PDF-only needs and c) did not 
care about other apps.  (And all a-c are clearly false, so that was not 
nice.)

> All I did is this: I wanted to explain how we came into the current
> state of development and emotions (which includes some unfriendly
> feelings directed towards his person, reflected even in SVN commit
> messages, if you follow the Commit Digest) from parts of the commu-
> nity who feel having their interests and feelings being neglected by
> the new approach and mailing list statements justifying the new
> KDE4 print design).

Yeah, he changed the API in a way that is hard to keep up with, but that 
happens with major version changes and "you can't make an omelette without 
breaking eggs".  AFAICS, it's for a good reason, and now the question how 
apps that rely on a PS-workflow (which I hope are not that many, since apps 
that created PS via Qt/QPrinter are *not* affected) can be adapted to that 
API change.  In the worst case, KDE3's printing system has to be used as a 
compatibility layer, but that would be UNIX only AFAICS.

> And I wanted to explain the current situation without resorting to
> myths ("PDF is the only supported format for Linux printing in the
> very near future").

Yet you brought the myth into play that Thomas did only care about PDF.

Ciao, /  /
     /--/
    /  / ANS