My Fedora 8 wish list

With the release of Fedora 7 not far away, I’ve been thinking about what improvements I would like to make for Fedora 8.

  • Printer status feedback. I started some work on this, but it needs finishing off. The hal backend needs to detect paper-out conditions, and so far only the HPLIP driver detects ink-low. Ideally we’d have proper ink level reporting supported in our main printer drivers.
  • When a printer is plugged in, ask the user for a PPD if we can’t find a sufficiently good one.  This needs work in hal-cups-utils and the print job manager applet, and a proper API needs to be designed.  Once it’s all working properly we should have visual feedback when (a) the printer is plugged in, while we search for a driver, and (b) the printer queue is added and ready for printing.
  • Part of the above work will involve re-working system-config-printer not to be dependent on foomatic, but instead to use only CUPS.  We ought to be able to do proper Device ID matching on the PPDs provided by CUPS.  Foomatic provides its PPDs that way now, so we can get them all from the same place.
  • The HPLIP service still runs even when there is no HP hardware attached, and it shouldn’t.

Not sure how many of those I’ll get to.  There never seems to be as much time as I think there will be.


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5 responses to “My Fedora 8 wish list”

  1. andyp avatar

    Do you care about anything other than printers?
    Talk about maniacal focus!

  2. tim avatar

    Just fighting my corner. It’s a list of changes I would like to make, myself. I doubt I’ll even get through that short list to be honest.

    Obviously the list of changes I’d like other people to make would be longer. 🙂 I think I can summarise that list as “fix the bugs”…

  3. Robert avatar

    Take a look at the work done by the OpenSolaris team, maybe the code can be refactored to something more cross platform, for the GPL/LGPLed bits

    http://blogs.gnome.org/view/calum/2007/05/16/0

  4. tim avatar

    Robert: it’s nice, although I think disabling the queue on disconnect is problematic. We tried that but had to revert it (in hal-cups-utils-0.6.4). Some devices just seem badly behaved.

    Being able to set the queue name is nice. With our current design you’d have to clone the existing queue, which I suppose isn’t ideal.

  5. ION PAVALUCA avatar

    I want in Fedora 8 postfix with mysql support.
    I need it for use properly syscp.