Thursday, May 17, 2012

cups-1.6 will be loads of fun

I've spent a bit of time recently looking at the current state of what will become cups-1.6, and preparing a live ebuild for subversion head (net-print/cups-9999). My only conclusion is, the transition from 1.5 to 1.6 will give us all loads of fun time... Here are some of the highlights:
  • The serial and parallel port backends have been removed. Need USB or LAN now to talk to your printer.
  • The PHP and Perl scripting modules have been removed.
  • Remote printer discovery via CUPS, LDAP, or SLP is not supported anymore (what was known so-far as "browsing"). Instead you will need to use Zeroconf/Bonjour or Avahi.
  • The filter code that allowed to directly print images is gone. (Maybe just moved to a separate package.)
Nice, isn't it? Anyway...  if any of you feels like joining the printing team give me a shout!

edit, 21/May: most of the removed code just made its way into cups-filters, as several people pointed out in comments below... so no need to panic...

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

CMake is getting verbose

Public announcement: we've just changed the default settings in cmake-utils.eclass, and as a result now cmake-based builds will display a verbose build log instead of the terse "one line per file" version. In the same way as with autotools, the entire compiler / linker / whatever command line is printed, which should simplify bug hunting a lot...