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

[Stefan Urbanek]

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?

What about creating a printing backend?

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, ...)

Stefan
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