What I'm up to

I guess I've been rather scarce for a while.  A software upgrade on my
server went awry (because it turns out that 2.6 doesn't support Initio
SCSI controllers), and since it's only a few months before I was
planning to upgrade my hardware anyway I went ahead and did so.
However, that meant that I couldn't upgrade my system, but rather I
had to reinstall it.  It's taken some time to get the pieces back
together.  The good news is that SUSE 9.1 is much, much better than
8.1 (which was a good release itself); I had to do far fewer custom
hacks to configure things for my setup.

Now, what I'm up to: I'm looking at printers.xml with an eye toward
the following:

1) Allow specification of arbitrary parameters.

2) Separate the concept of driver and printer.

The first is already coded; the second I am working on as my time
permits.

What I ultimately expect the file to look like is something like this:

    <family name="escp2">
      <driver name="escp2-580" model="42">
        <parameter type="float" name="MagentaGamma" value="0.95"/>
        <parameter type="float" name="YellowGamma" value="0.9"/>
        <parameter type="float" name="Gamma" value="0.731"/>
        <parameter type="float" name="Density" value="1.0"/>
      </driver>
    </family>
...
    <printers>
      <printer name="EPSON Stylus Color 480" driver="escp2-480" 
manufacturer="Epson"/>
      <printer name="EPSON Stylus C20SX" driver="escp2-480" 
manufacturer="Epson"/>
      ...
    </printers>

I suppose we could ultimately allow overriding of parameters in the
printer declaration, but my intent at this point is to not allow that.

This can all be done without any API change at all, other than the
fact that there will no longer be a 1-1 mapping between printers and
drivers, so stp_get_printer_by_driver would have to return something
arbitrary, like perhaps the first printer encountered that uses a
particular driver.  However, it would be useful to allow applications
to get drivers as well as printers, so that e. g. test programs don't
have to keep a list of what drivers they've already seen.

This would require something like

struct stp_driver;
typedef struct stp_driver stp_driver_t;
extern int stp_driver_count(void);
extern const stp_printer_t *stp_get_driver_by_index(int idx);

and so forth.  We could choose to preserve compatibility by keeping
all of the stp_printer calls (which would essentially be shorthand) or
not.

What do people think about this?

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Project lead for Gimp Print   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton


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