Re: [RFC] Remove gui/PrinterTypes directory containing PPDs from core

[Gregory John Casamento]

See below...

--- Stefan Urbanek <stefan@agentfarms.net> wrote:
> On 2004-06-05 10:10:21 +0200 Alex Perez <aperez@student.santarosa.edu> wrote:
> 
> > I know I'm not the first one to have this idea, but I do believe I'm the 
> > first one to act upon it in the recent past. After doing a quick analysis
> of 
> > the size of things in gui, the thing that stuck out like a sore thumb in
> the 
> > gui directory was PrinterTypes, which is essentially just a big huge 
> > directory structure full of PostScript Printer Defition files (PPD's). The 
> > PPD's in English.lproj are 6.9 MEGABYTES, while all of -gui is 17MB, making
> 
> > the PrinterDocs folder account for nearly 41% of the entire size of -gui. I
> 
> > personally found this huge size amazing and unjustifiable.
> > 
> > The percentage of people who do a CVS checkout and use the resulting PPDs
> to 
> > print is probably near zero. Most distributions also come with their own 
> > PPDs, which we (meaning packagers) should look into ways of utilizing for
> the 
> > sake of transparency.
> > 
> > I propose one of the following:
> > 
> > (A) Move only the PPDs to a separate CVS module, outside of core.
> > (B) Move the entire PrinterTypes folder into a separate CVS module, 
> > PrinterTypes (or something similar)
> > 
> > Comments?
> > 

For now, I would go with (B) as it seems the most reasonable.

> What about creating a printing backend?

For the long term, I believe that this is the best idea.   Either this or the
use of a printing system which already allows is to have support for several
different platforms.  

> GNUstep should have more "backends" as environmental hooks. GNUstep should be
> either self sufficient (default backend with full or dummy functionality) or
> it should use native host-environment capabilities. This applies to other GUI
> suff as well (Font Manager backend, Pasteboard, spelling, workspace, ...)

GJC

> Stefan
> -- 
> http://stefan.agentfarms.net
> 
> First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you
> win.
> - Mahatma Gandhi
> 


=====
Gregory John Casamento -- CEO/President Open Logic Corp.
#### Maintainer of Gorm for GNUstep.


        
                
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