🚀 go-pugleaf

Submitted-by: geoff@tyger.East.Sun.COM (Geoff Arnold @ Sun BOS - R.H. coast near the top)

Actually, the biggest pain in the ass is not the printing commands, or
even the administration model. It's the absence of a standard printing
API. If you don't believe me, take a look at the sources for pcnfsd.
To determine what printers are available, queue jobs, cancel jobs,
list queues, etc. I have to spawn commands (making sure that I
get the location right - is "lpc" in /usr/bin, /usr/etc, or /usr/ucb
on this system?) and parse the output, hoping that the vendor hasn't
tweaked the output format or localized things in some way. (Companies that
are really good about preserving the syntax of commands seem to think
nothing of changing error messages, etc.)

It's been a while since I looked at the palladium doc (I've just
pulled DEC-palladium-overview.ps over from gatekeeper.dec.com - it's in
/.3/net/info/ietf/print-wg - and I'll read it over), but I don't recall
there being any kind of API which would be suitable for cross-platform
uses. Plus as Marcus said, it's still pretty vaporous..

Maybe we should just define a printing API. Nail down a really
straightforward interface (just half a dozen calls or so), then divvy
up the work to create a SunOS shared lib for Solaris 2.x, plus one for
SunOS 4.1.x, a DLL for MS Windows, a static lib for BSD386/386bsd (and
linux?), one for Ultrix etc. Thoughts?

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Geoff Arnold, PC-NFS architect, Sun Select. (geoff.arnold@East.Sun.COM)

Volume-Number: Volume 30, Number 35