Summary: | Printing consistently broken/buggy/unstable/unusable | ||
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Product: | Gentoo Linux | Reporter: | skaumo <skaumo> |
Component: | New packages | Assignee: | Gentoo Linux bug wranglers <bug-wranglers> |
Status: | RESOLVED NEEDINFO | ||
Severity: | major | ||
Priority: | High | ||
Version: | unspecified | ||
Hardware: | x86 | ||
OS: | Linux | ||
Whiteboard: | |||
Package list: | Runtime testing required: | --- |
Description
skaumo
2010-06-21 21:28:36 UTC
skaumo, to me, printing has been a pain in the neck in general (not just in Gentoo). I stay away from it when possible, and am thus not part of the gentoo printing team, so I can't totally speak for them, but I have some suspicions on why there are common problems. The diversity of printers is a big burden on developers -- it can make it so hard to reproduce bug reports. I have written custom printer drivers for embedded devices, and it is amazing how completely different printers from the same manufacturer can be. Aside from maintainers trying to reproduce bugs, those new printer series need new drivers which causes upstream driver churn. This creates pressure against keeping the same stable ghostscript version for too long, since a stable ghostscript that doesn't support a year-old printer would be pretty disappointing too. Libraries like libpng need to keep moving forwards in versions as well -- printing is only one among many uses of libpng. Who knows how many different printing setups were tested when libpng was being stabled -- it belongs to the base-system team, who have plenty of things to do other than test every graphics library with a wide range of printer setups. I really don't know the solution to your problem of printing instability; my best suggestion is that you get involved with the printing team by volunteering to test printing-related package with your setup when they are candidates to become stable. If we had a team of users who tested against a variety of setups, then we might actually get somewhere in printing quality control. However, given that you normally only print once every 6 months, that may not sound very appealing to you... if you can't think of something else specific to help the printing team manage this difficult task better, we'll have to close this bug as "can't fix". You are still welcome to post to their mailing list to try to brainstorm on ways to improve stability, but if so I recommend taking a positive approach rather than coming across as only negative (for instance don't imply they are less competent than the apache maintainers -- it really is a lot easier to get a web server stable than the whole printing stack for N different popular brands of printer). I didn't find any useful information in this bug, sorry. If you have specific problems to report, then provide the proper logs, and steps to reproduce. One bug per one package. |