[Kde-print-devel] Report of Linux Printing Summit. Part 1: observations

[Cristian Tibirna]

Hello

As some of you might know, I was invited and kindly sponsored by OSDL to go to 
the Linux Printing Summit in Atlanta on 10 to 12 April.

These were 3 days of very intense information gathering. I consider that this 
was a constructive Linux/KDE/FOSS-related reunion from which I learned a lot 
and it helped better positioning my understanding of matters related to KDE 
printing.

Reports of the happenings at the Summit have already started to appear, 
written by people with more talent:
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1931
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1934

I will restrain myself (especially because of lack of time) to the following 
notes, observations I've put together during the 3 days of the meeting and in 
the few hours of reflection thereafter, that I managed to steal from my 
heckly loaded schedule. A separate message bound to follow will contain my 
conclusions/decisions derived from what follows.

* people still perceive KDEPrint as the most advanced technology in its class 
in Open Source (and not only);

* those knowledgeable of KDEPrint status (most surprisingly, printer 
manufacturers, but also distributors like Mandriva) are irked by the lack of 
perceived movement in the realm of KDEPrint development.

* the status of KDEPrint development is worse than I initially thought, when 
seen in the light of the information in the Summit. We are drastically behind 
CUPS development. (But we also have action items, like usability reports, 
dating of almost a year back (and some open bug reports even older) and I am 
also aware of that)

* compared with the perceived stalled status of KDEPrint, even a very young 
(and still quite lacking) development process in GTK are triggering a lot of 
interest from hardware manufacturers and distributors

* KDEPrint is still very little known. There are features and possibilities 
with it that applications, distributions and printer manufs. would be very 
interested in, but they aren't advertized enough

* While very complete (at least in respect with what CUPS-1.1 offers), 
KDEPrint technology is also quite complex. It could be quite overwhelming for 
normal users while not easily enough extendable for power users (like driver 
writers and professional application developers)

* KDEPrint in the non-enviable position of depending on fundamental technology 
(printing standards, CUPS, drivers) for our correct functioning and feature 
fulfilling, but it is also the one piece of software to take the blame when 
things don't work. We have to become more directly active and develop 
relations with down-the-stream developers (CUPS, drivers etc.) in order to 
make our work more useful (I believe this is one of Michael Goffioul's 
success with his code)

* there are a lot of usability issues in KDEPrint

* things in which KDEPrint development is concerned start moving faster after 
the Summit. There is discussion about:
- a common standard for printing dialogs, so that these become uniformized all 
over Linux applications (KDE, GTK, mozilla, OOo etc.)
- a technology for framework agnostic printer driver plugins/extensions for 
the printing dialog
- something similar for application extensions

So, if you went reading until down here, please consider reading my next 
message, stating conclusions and decisions.

Thanks for your attention

-- 
Cristian Tibirna
KDE developer .. tibirna at kde.org .. http://www.kde.org