[Okular-devel] [Bug 181290] Landscape pdf prints with wrong orientation when choosing landscape in print dialog

[Pino Toscano]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=181290





--- Comment #34 from Pino Toscano <pino kde org>  2010-02-22 01:18:58 ---
(In reply to comment #30)
> "KDE 3 has a printing system, KDE 4 doesn't. Spot the difference."
> 
> That's the key. KDE4 doesn't have a kdeprint like subsytem. What a functional
> regression from KDE3! I really don't get the whole development practice of KDE
> in some fields.

Yes, there are some things you don't get.
The first and most important is that we (Okular developers, or what's left
nowadays) tried *hard* to not be in this situation. We weren't able, kdeprint
had no development for more than 6 years and nobody took the effort to make it
work as it should have with the kde4/qt4 porting.
I personally had fights with other developers especially because of this, and
my mailbox can count *hate* emails coming periodially from KDE users because of
printing, just like I would have been the one deciding to make printing less a
priority (rather the opposite, unsuccessful). Do you think I love the current
situation?

(In reply to comment #33)
> (In reply to comment #31)
> > #29 and #30, if you are not going to give coding time nor money to fix the
> > issue you should nor really comment because your comments add exactly *zero*
> > value to the issue, we all know printing is broken.
> 
> So, Albert, are you saying that KDE developers just don't care about the
> opinion of their users? The users should not be entitled to their own opinion
> on KDE because they don't give money or coding time?

There's a huge difference between "be entitled to their opinion" and "repeating
the same concept over and over". As said above, broken or
less-than-optimally-working printing is overly known by us. Repeating in each
bug report "printing is bad, please fix it!" will not magically fix problems
over night.
We don't need people to repeat that over and over, we need people to help.

> You know, it is weird, i have always thought that contributing with a bug
> report is a CONTRIBUTE to the project exactly as it could be with money or
> coding time because they say not only what is wrong, but also what the users
> think is IMPORTANT.
> [...]

As I said, we know printing is an important task, yes. If you don't believe so,
please read my first paragraph above and tell me for whatever else reason I
would had to fight against kdeprint removal, if I would not think that printing
is important.
But, at the same time, you should try to understand a bit that printing is a
rather complex system, which needs a lot more than one day of hacking. And this
bug report proves this once more.
Okular team is very small (barely to the existance), and kind of "recreating" a
"mini" printing system mapping from the few functionalities of the Qt system to
our needs is not an easy task.

> What is the point of
> wasting coding time adding useless graphical effects when an important
> subsystem of KDE still is missing to work properly (when it used to work in
> KDE3)? Maybe coding special effects is more fun than getting a printer to work
> out of the box? Do you think KDE users need more special effects or print
> without having to turn the world upside-down?

This is an huge false misconception: if a guy is interested in coding desktop
effects, most probably he won't do printing stuff.
Just like I chose Okular, I would not develop an email client nor a window
manager.
So, don't think that more people working on some aspects of the desktop
environment means less people for other areas; they are unrelated.

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