Re: 0.14.0 - Almost there ;)

On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Jason M. Felice wrote:

[snip]
> > > lpd.  Then we can have command line and graphical tools to start, stop
> > > manipulate the queue, etc.
> > 
> > I'd been thinking this would be a better way to do it myself.  Some
> > advantages I see would be:
> > 
> >  * It really does a very different thing from the user's perspective,
> >    even if the back end is similar.
> > 
> >  * We don't get two set of options of the command line; "lp5250" or
> >    whatever it gets called should have switches for all the printer
> >    options that can be set, but tn5250 doesn't need to get cluttered
> >    up with them.
> > 
> >  * The separation makes the difference (or even its existence) more
> >    obvious, and might encourage more work on it specifically.
> > 
> > I've got a few wishlist features for the print driver, like making it
> > talk directly to parallel or serial printers, and pass back
> > indications like out-of-paper immediately.  ("Operator action
> > required" and "Press Ready, Start or Start/Stop" are two messages I'm
> > very familiar with.)

Maybe it could have multiple backends.  I want to keep the flexibility of
being able to pipe output to other filters for creating PDF files, etc.

> The idea of the daemon _is_ better.  I'm sold on it as well.
> 
> Anybody play with CUPS (common UNIX printing system)?  We should probably
> at least _look_ at that before doing anything.  It should have the ability
> to report printer status and such without giving up lpd access to the printer.
> 
> CUPS is a standard, I don't even know if there is an implementation yet. Is
> there?

I looked at CUPS.  There is sourcecode (and links for RPMS) at
www.cups.org.  Looking at the source it's not immediately obvious to me if
you can get status about paper, but I didn't look at it too carefully.  I
know this might be a Linuxism, but doesn't the newer parallel port code
support sharing between multiple processes?

Mike 

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