Short report about a partial printing summit at LWE SF 2005

[Cristian Tibirna]

Hello

As you might know [1], I was kindly invited to participate in the 
linuxprinting.org  (http://linuxpriting.org) booth at LWE-SF 2005.

I met there some of the important people from the Linux printing landscape:

Till Kamppeter (linuxpriting.org and Mandriva)
Kurt Pfeifle (KDE, CUPS and FreeNX)
David Suffield (HP Linux printing drivers)
Patrick Powell (LPRng)

There also were representatives from our major sponsor for that particular 
event, Ricoh: George Liu, Hitoshi Sekine as well as Ulrich Wehner from 
Lanier.

I was a humble starting kdeprint maintainer in a world of giants. People 
around (both my booth colleagues and the visitors) had only superlatives for 
the different KDE print technologies, which speaks a lot about the amazing 
quality and quantity of the work put into these by Michael Goffioul and his 
helpers. I have really big shoes to fill now, and I try to do my best.

From the numerous discussions and insights I received in SF, I came up with a 
consolidation of the short term plans for the work on kde printing tools and 
tech.

In urgency (and future chronological) order:
1) complete support for string, enum, password and integer data types in 
Foomatic
2) add such support (as in 1) to the CUPS backend interface.
3) port kde print code to Qt4/KDE4
4) take in the account as much as possible the usability suggestions in both 
usability.org and bugs.kde.org

In addition, a permanent care I will grant to tending to bug reports.

I have no precise enough estimates of time required for each of the above 
major development chapters. I know, although, that for the time being (and 
for many months ahead, unless I get a KDE related job), I will have no more 
than 15h/week for KDE development, of which the huge majority will go to 
kdeprint.

If you have suggestions concerning the order or the contents of the 
development targets above, let me know.

Thank you

[1]
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1311
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1313
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1324
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1328
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1329

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