Category: Software

  • Re-writing hal-cups-utils to avoid hal

    The program that adds printer queues when a USB printer is connected is hal-cups-utils. It is a simple program that hooks into hal, the hardware abstraction layer, and adds/enables/disables CUPS queues as necessary. As hal will be going away shortly — that, and the fact that hal-cups-utils doesn’t really work very well — I have…

  • Profiling Python

    Yesterday I spent a little bit of time improving the speed of adding a new printer using system-config-printer. The main problem was that several bugs had conspired to make it search for all printer drivers three times instead of just once (oops). After fixing that I tried profiling it to see what was taking the…

  • Generating ChangeLog files from commit logs

    I love git, but I also loved ChangeLog files and git is not so good at merging them. For a while I played around with gnulib‘s git-merge-changelog which made merges really easy. It worked fairly well, but now I’m bored of documenting my changes twice, both in the ChangeLog file and in the git commit…

  • One PDF implementation down (many to go)

    Recently I updated CUPS in Fedora 9 and 10 to version 1.3.10. One big change in CUPS 1.3.10 is in the filter for converting PDF documents to PostScript: it has been completely reimplemented. This sounds like a lot of work but in fact it is now a very simple wrapper program.

  • Fedora 11 test updates for printing

    Fedora 11 is finally out. The bad news is that there are several known issues (well, known now) with printing. Unfortunately I was tied up with PDF-related security fixes for several months and did not have the time I wanted to spend on polishing Fedora 11.