Re: netatalk 1.5pre3 candidate

andrew morgan wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, Michel Jouvin wrote:
> > --On jeudi 7 décembre 2000 15:55 -0500 jeff <jeff <at> univrel.pr.uconn.edu> wrote:
> > > I'd like to put together a 1.5pre3 candidate; is anyone working on
> > > something that they would like to finish up before the release?
> >
> > I didn't find the time to find why papd is not working properly but I think
> > this is an issue that we must solve before final release... Just to keep in
> > mind.
> 
> How long do you want to hold off before releasing it?  I intend to rewrite
> major portions of papd.  The way it handles incoming data is pretty
> strange.  I hope to spend some time on it this month.

Matthew Geier had suggested SDP (Service Discovery Protocol) support,
which would be nice to roll in, even if it is only beta quality at the
time.

The papd changes would be nice for the final release, as people are
probably *not* going to want to do major rewrites of configuration files
after incremental upgrades. Do you think it would be wise to keep the
papd changes switchable from the autoconf system until they are more or
less completed, so as to not break CVS builds?

> Here are the changes I'd like to make:
> 
> 1. Samba-style config file.
> 2. Don't bother reading PPD files to generate printer responses.  Set
> printer responses for postscript queries in config file.

Don't the Macs need the PPD files for information about the printer?

> 3. Binary compatibility.

I probably should have mentioned "binary printing" in my 1.5 TODO list.

> 4. Samba-style printing -- save incoming print job to file, then call a
> user-specified program on that file.
> 
> If you haven't been able to tell, I'm very happy with the way that samba
> handles print jobs.  I don't like dealing with PPD files.  I'd rather set
> all those responses in the config file directly.  I also would remove the
> code which lets papd mess around in the lpr spool directory.  This can
> only cause us grief.
> 
> Here's a sample of how I'd like the config file to look:
> 
> print command = /usr/bin/lpr -P%p -r %s
> 
> [printer1]
>   comment = Printer #1
>   path = /var/spool/netatalk/printer1/
>   authenticated = true
>   auth methods = uams_clrtxt.so uams_guest.so
>   product = "(HP LaserJet 8100 Series)"
>   psversion = "(2014.112) 0"
>   languagelevel = "2"
>   freevm = "13000000"
>   modelname = "HP LaserJet 8100 Series"
>   nickname = "HP LaserJet 8100 Series"
>   colordevice = false
>   binary = true

This looks like a good idea for a config file. We might want to consider
adding a printing system variable (as in samba, which this seems to be
modeled after) which would allow it to use lpd, cups, etc.

For 1.5 (final), I was thinking more of a stable release than anything
else, whether it had certain features or not. The pre-releases should
just be tightening up of the code, so that the general
netatalk-consuming public has something as stable as 1.4b2+asun2.1.3
was, with features like 1.4b2+asun2.1.4 (and bug fixes), with community
contributed patches.

jeff