Requesting feature freeze exemption for Gwenview

[Kurt Pfeifle]

Andreas Hartmetz wrote:
> About 30% [+/- 40 %] or so of it work as intended and the source, while 
> apparently structured reasonably well, is just a whole lot of code. This is 
> why nobody stepped up to fix it, apparently. 

No, historically even, printing is the "unwanted, unloved child" on all OS
platforms. Coding a printing system has always been a one-man show (look
at who wrote the old LPR/LPD system, then LPRng, now CUPS...)

There must be a reason why you have quite a few of competing browsers,
dozens
competing music players, video viewers and so on....

Printing is just not "sexy". And once it works, somehow, nobody (new)
touches
it any more. For a long time. Until it becomes so painful again it turns
into
unbearable.

> It looks just too daunting.
> Printing (with all the options and backends) itself is nontrivial, so... 

Yes, printing is one of the most complicated day to day tasks one can en-
counter in IT, for every role: user, administrator, ... coder. Wait... for
coders it is not a "day to day" thing. And it *IS* daunting. (That's why
even Microsoft was not able to really fix it in their last 15 years).

> there 
> seems to be no way around putting a whole lot of effort into it. And it 
> doesn't help that most developers are busy getting their own stuff release 
> ready.
> The more obscure parts of KDEPrint didn't even work right in KDE 3, at least 
> for me. Double sided printing and so on - good luck... I had to use Acrobat 
> Reader and printing to PDF from there to do this.

Funny. Double sided does work reliably, once printing works *at all*.
And it is news to me that it would work better from Acroread than from
any other application.

> So we are, basically, screwed until an experienced developer with enough time 
> appears out of the blue.

There will no-one appear from the blue, I bet. Or are you praying for
it?

-- 
Kurt Pfeifle
System & Network Printing Consultant ---- Linux/Unix/Windows/Samba/CUPS
Infotec Deutschland GmbH  .....................  Hedelfinger Strasse 58
A RICOH Company  ...........................  D-70327 Stuttgart/Germany