Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Jason Flatt <jflatt AT sourcemage.org>]

I've had this outstanding bug [0] on my plate for quite a while.  Over the 
course of the last couple of months, I've been reading about and 
experimenting with cups, espgs, ghostscript and a few other printer section 
programs trying to figure out what exactly is going on.  I've been doing this 
for a greater understanding of those programs and the printing process, and 
because I'd really like to get rid of that awkward circular casting setup the 
way it is now.

What I've determined are these things:
 * cups does not depend on any ghostscript program to compile.
 * cups does depend on espgs to print to postscript printers (AFAIKT, mostly 
laser printers -- I haven't quite pinned this down, but I will)
 * cups will not print with any ghostscript program other than espgs.
 * cups does not depend on any ghostscript program to print to a 
non-postscript printer (for example, an inkjet printer using foomatic 
drivers).
 * espgs optionally depends on cups.
 * espgs does not need cups to work correctly as a ghostscript program.
 * espgs needs to be compiled with cups support in order for cups and it to 
work correctly with each other.
 * none of the other ghostscript programs know or care about cups (I actually 
suspect the programs don't care at all).  :^)

(I've also determined a few things about gimp-print and will be changing some 
dependencies there, as well.)

Here's what I've decided to do:
 * make the cups spell not depend on any ghostscript spell.
 * make the espgs spell not depend on cups at all and give $OPTS the 
--without-cups option w/o asking for feed back.
  * create a new spell based on cups (called cups-espgs) that will compile 
and 
install cups and then compile and install espgs with the --with-cups option 
specified (no asking).

That will give a few things:
 * people who need the cups/espgs combo can have it with only a single spell 
cast.
 * people who use cups w/non-postscript printers can have it w/o needing 
espgs 
(or can choose one of the other ghostscript programs for other things).
 * people who want espgs but don't print or use cups to print can do so w/o 
the extra overhead.

I suspect that last item represents, by far, the least number of users.  :^)  
This is what I am going to be doing over the course of the next week or two.  
I just wanted to kind of give folks a heads up, so when the changes come 
across they are aware of what is going on.

[0] http://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7548

-- 
Jason Flatt
Source Mage GNU/Linux: Linux so advanced, it may as well be magic.
http://www.sourcemage.org/
jflatt AT sourcemage.org

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