[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
Mike Shaver
shaver at mozilla.org
Tue Dec 13 06:37:29 PST 2005
On 12-Dec-05, at 8:33 PM, Till Kamppeter wrote:
> And we all were of the opinion that
> the GNOME printing dialog (and also the printing dialogs of Firefox
> and
> Thunderbird) needs improvement.
Before Firefox 1.0, there was much kerfuffle over this, and out of
that came a pledge from someone in the GNOME camp to separate the
gnome-print dialog system from the gnome-print "you must render
through this" system, such that the dialog could be used on GNOME
desktops. I don't think it ever materialized, though I can't be
bothered to look for the bug now. After the amount of crap I took
for pushing to get the GNOME file dialog in -- and I mean that it was
the single biggest usability complaint from our Linux user community
by several orders of magnitude -- I was in no real rush to go that
route again. I remain unrushed, but if people want to do the work
(including the user-testing work, keeping in mind that we actually
care about GNOME installations that are more than a year old, etc.)
then there's probably time to get it changed in Firefox 2 if the
patch is good enough.
(The KDE people are much less vitriolic about how Firefox is wearing
white after Labour Day on their desktop, for whatever reason, and
nobody has bothered to even wire up the file dialog, except for one
frustrated hacker who used GNOME.)
Of course, we support more than just Linux in the Unix-printing
world, but if the time has come for an XP_LINUX that differs from
XP_UNIX, or even XP_LINUX_GNOME, then I'd be willing to hear a pitch
for it.
> Today I talked with Frederic Crozat, GNOME packager/maintainer and
> desktop developer here at Mandriva, and David Barth, vice president
> for
> engineering, about the development of the printing dialogs in GNOME,
> Firefox, and Thunderbird.
I *humbly* submit that that group is not the right set of people to
be discussing the future of the printing model in Firefox and
Thunderbird. By all means put together a proposal for improving how
we print on Linux, but please don't think that it will be accepted
simply by fiat (even my mighty fiat, ahem!). I also caution against
what we've seen as a pattern so far, which is "well, then we'll just
patch our build", for various reasons that aren't really appropriate
for this list.
Mike
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