[Pkg-cups-devel] cupsys: bug triaging

Jeff Licquia licquia at debian.org
Tue Aug 16 04:29:22 UTC 2005


On Sun, 2005-08-14 at 20:27 +0300, Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> Following the recent flood of bugs (some of which were raised to RC) on cupsys, 
> I have taken a quick look at outstanding bugs. We have *that* many bugs? Yikes!

I'm sure it's better than when I was solely in charge... :-)

> First, the issue that keeps on popping since a few days:  the missing dependency 
> on 'gs-esp'. Am I correct to assume that the only reason why it is in Recommends 
> instead of Depends is because not all printers are of the Postscript variety and 
> therefore won't necessarily all require Postscript preprocessing?

Actually, it's the reverse.

PostScript printers don't need pstoraster (which needs gs-esp); CUPS can
send the PostScript directly to the printer.  Non-PostScript printers
are the ones that require postprocessing into the printer's language,
which is done with pstoraster and rasterto[whatever].

> Would it be fair to assume that all modern printer *are* Postscript-compatible 
> and to move 'gs-esp' to Depends just to avoid that sort of noisy bug report?
> If yes, then I could logon to SVN and fix this now.

Modulo the reversal of sense I mentioned earlier, I am strongly for this
move.

Very few printers out today do PostScript, and thus nearly all printers
will require pstoraster.  The design of CUPS is such that it allows
people to drop PPD files in and expect them to work; while there are
some situations where this might not be the case, in practical terms
these will likely be rare with Debian.  Unless, of course, we drop the
dep on gs-esp, in which case it will be the rare PPD that just works
with cupsys.

Some people will continue to complain, because they have to have a
PostScript renderer on their systems when, technically, they have
perfectly good ones in their printers.  Compared to the number of people
who will complain because their printer doesn't work, I think this is
something we can handle.

Some people object to having two copies of gs on their system: gs-gpl
for general-purpose stuff, and gs-esp for CUPS.  This is a legitimate
complaint, and it could be fixed by getting the CUPS raster driver into
gs-gpl.  Then, an add-on package could provide pstoraster and other
assorted stuff that would allow cupsys to use gs-gpl to do its work.

It was my understanding that Easy Software Products was keen on getting
gdevcups into GPL GhostScript, so ESP GhostScript could go away.  I see
from their recent changelog that they've been incorporating other
innovations into their fork, so there might be good reason to keep
gs-esp around as an option.  Still, even if gs-gpl's upstream is
strangely reluctant to incorporate the driver, perhaps Debian's
maintainers could be persuaded.  Long ago, I got the maintainer at the
time to agree in principle to the move; maybe it should be brought up
again.




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