Some benefits of printerd
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012Recently I talked about a new print spooler under development, printerd. In that post I mentioned briefly how printerd is structured, but did not go very deeply into why or what the project is for.
Firstly, printerd is experimental and is very far from being a functional print spooler. It doesn’t yet run any filters, for instance, and has no backends of its own to transport jobs to devices. So far it is just a test of what a Linux print spooler would look like if it were written today.
There are several problems printerd aims to solve. Some of the solutions come automatically from implementing it as a polkit-enabled D-Bus system service. I mentioned one of them in the original post about printer: the fact of having an asynchronous client API. All D-Bus services can be used asynchronously thanks to the D-Bus client library. This approach means the print dialog will be able to use printerd without blocking (and without having to start another thread to use it).