Consider me sceptical if we rely on Trolltech's qprinter only, and if we do that long-term (was: "KDE4 printing: results of IRC meeting")

[Thiago Macieira]

Kurt Pfeifle wrote:
>But how long will TT devote resources into this? They may leave it
>bit-rotting as soon as it "somehow" works. As they did with the rest
>of the "print stuff" support in their toolkit since KDE 1.0 was relea-
>sed...

You said it yourself: printing isn't sexy. Yes. And people don't print 
that much anymore.

It is a low-priority feature compared to other big-shots like Graphics 
View, Network or XML.

But it's also a very low-maintenance one. KDEPrint has gone basically 
without changes other than bugfixes here and there for 3-4 years. Why do 
you suddenly expect there to be a lot of work in the next 2-3 years? Past 
experience shows that it is not the case.

I give you a couple of reasons why we should go on this track:
1) it's the only realistic option. But even with that aside:

2) less duplication of efforts. We won't need to keep adding all the 
latest features in QPrinter and the KDE equivalent, as well as the 
dialogs. For all platforms.

3) Trolltech is a radically different company compared to 10 years ago. 
The engineering department is much, much larger. And growing at a fast 
pace.

4) There's no reason why community-contributed code as well as feature 
requests can't be added. Remember that KDE is the most proeminent user of 
Qt. If Qt's printing system was sub-par so far, maybe it was because KDE 
wasn't using it? (therefore, less exposure; therefore, less feature 
requests, etc.)

5) The Printing System is in our roadmap. And when I say that, it means we 
want to have a good printing system and we will dedicate the resources to 
doing it.
(No, I'm not saying TT will dedicate someone to doing every whim the KDE 
community asks for)


We had the very same discussion two years ago on QtNetwork and KNetwork. I 
was the one arguing for KNetwork. In the end, two things convinced me for 
the other side, and that happened after my starting at Trolltech:

- the incredible mess that supporting a huge amount of platforms is, 
especially Windows's broken idea of sockets
- the amount of time required to maintain such an API -- I couldn't do it 
on my own

-- 
  Thiago Macieira  -  thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
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