john.layt.net

Hey, so really long time no blog, and almost as long no code.  Life, as you'll guess has been real busy, between a full-time job, uni, training (my first half-marathon coming up), and amazingly a full-on social life, KDE has struggled to compete for my time.  It's summer holidays now though, so no uni for a while which means time back on KDE.  It helps to have a place of my own now, a really nice apartment on Clapham Common in South London, where I can hack away uninterrupted (on that note, if you're passing through London on KDE-releated business and need a floor to crash on, drop me a line).  My first task is fixing up the Plasma Calendar which doesn't play well with the non-Gregorian calendar systems, and solving a few small bugs in the calendar systems in time for 4.3.

But enough of all that, I know what everyone's asking (or so it at least seems on the mailing lists/forums/bugzilla): what's the current status of Printing in KDE4?  Well, let me be clear here: KDEPrint is dead, not mostly dead, not just resting, but firmly staked through the heart and 6 feet under.  I know there are people out there who would like to see us have our own Print System and Print Dialog again, but they really don't realise the effort involved.  Anyone is more than welcome to have a crack, I’ll even help out with advice and pointers, but good luck as it's a huge and complex area that would take a team of several devs months of concerted effort to even get up to par.  I personally see little point in duplicating all the cross-platform Print Engine and Print Dialog stuff when we can hack on a Qt git branch and push the needed changes upstream for Qt 4.6 which is due out before any new KDEPrint could be ready.  I also see little point in duplicating all the Printer Admin stuff when most distros have now settled on a single config backend in system-config-printer which we can build on and contribute to.  Yes, there's restrictions in dealing with BIC and release schedules and we won’t always get our own way, but it relieves us of the ongoing maintenance burden, and all Qt apps on all platforms or all distros will also benefit.  Besides, in over a year of my tinkering with it no-one has stepped up to help out, so the resources just are not there to support a separate effort.  I don't even really want to be working on it, there's other stuff I find far more fun and fits better with my interests and very limited available time.

(Yes, I could eventually see us doing our own Print Dialog again, especially if the OpenPrinting effort comes together, but it would be built on QPrinter so we need to push the required features into there first).

So we need to focus on how best to achieve our goals by working with upstream, both Qt and system-config-printer.  I will be at Akademy all week working on it, if there's enough interest I'll get a BoF together to discuss a more co-ordinated effort, because relying on just me to get this done is a recipe for disaster (or at least a very long wait).

To start with I’ll post a series of blogs to cover things in more detail, what issues are still outstanding, how I see them being resolved, and what others can do to help:

* Printer Admin - The KCM module for Printer Configuration, and the Print Job Applet.
* Advanced Page Ranges - Adding Current Page, Odd/Even Page Set, and Non-Continuous Page Ranges to Qt
* Advanced CUPS options - Move all the KDE supported CUPS features into the Qt X11 Print Dialog
* Save/Restore Print Settings - Adding save and restore of current state to QPrinter, and direct support for this in the Print Dialog (a la OSX)
* File Printing - Yes, there is a way to hack X11 and probably OSX to do this, it's Windows that's the problem.
* Virtual Printers - Adding Print to Fax, Print to E-mail, Add Printer, etc directly in the Print Dialog printer selection combo box, and do we really want to?
* Page Previews – In-line previews in the Print Dialog, a la OSX.
* Utilities – kprinter and kprintfax.
* Other stuff - Anything else I can think of missing in Qt, e.g. full cross-platform support for apps adding tabs to the dialog, full cross-platform duplex support, fixing the CUPS properties dialog, etc
* The Future - The new OpenPrinting dialog, what has happened to that project???

So lets get the first one out of the way now: Printer Admin.  With Ubuntu and Mandriva both having adopted Red Hat's system-config-printer as their official printer configuration system, and at least Debian, Arch, Slackware and openSuse all packaging it, I think we can safely assume that it has a secure future.  Hey, if it's good enough for Til Kampeter to go with it instead of printerdrake, that's good enough for me.  Jonathon Riddell and the Kubuntu guys added a KCM and job applet in 4.2 and have put quite a bit of work into it for 4.3, so we seem to be well covered there now.  I know there are some complaints that it is very CUPS oriented and possibly doesn't play so well with LPR-only systems, but with every modern distro shipping with CUPS as the default print system, if you're one of the 6 people explicitly choosing not to use CUPS but still expect to use a modern desktop like KDE,  then I don't think it's a big ask that you have to manually configure your own printers.

Next blog, advanced page range selection, the stuff that people seem to be complaining about most (or is that persistance of settings?).