[Gs-devel] Re: GNU/ESP Ghostscript

[Michael Sweet]

rillian wrote:
> ...
> The rest I can't really comment on, maybe someone else can address them.
> Certainly we'd look at any patches you generate. :) Dynamic drivers is
> something we've discussed in the past, but I think the plan is leaning
> more toward running the driver as separate process at the moment.

For printer drivers, using separate processes works quite well (we've
been doing that for years...); for other types of devices (image files,
displays, etc.) it may not be the best way.

> Would you be interested in working up any of these bits you've done as a
> patch against GS_6_5? I don't know how long raph wants to hold the
> release, but we could certainly do a 6.52 a bit later. The hpijs and
> omni integration is all new to the GNU release, so there will probably
> be bugs to fix in any case.

The CUPS bits should be pretty easy to add; however, we've made some
fairly extensive changes to the GS init and device support files to fix
the setpagedevice handling; I don't know if those are needed yet, as
I avoid any non-GNU releases to keep our code pristine.

We've also made fixes for the "debug" output from ghostscript to
redirect messages to stderr instead of stdout.  This actually allows
Ghostscript to be used as a filter...

> ...
> Certainly. That could be something we watch for in code review.
> Traditionally the GPL releases have been a tarball-only thing, but it
> sounds like it would be good to actually maintain such a thing in cvs,
> especially if people are willing to look after it.

That's the main thing - we want to maintain a GNU version of Ghostscript
that everyone can use.  I'm worried about the chance of code pollution,
both ways.

> How allergic are you to the AFPL/Artifex flavors? I can certainly

For personal use, I have absolutely no problem with them.  However,
for our printing system (CUPS) and other assorted projects, we can't
use the AFPL version without serious difficulties.

(And as a side note, we don't want to use AFPL Ghostscript in our
commercial printing product either, as Aladdin wanted more for the
Ghostscript license than we could charge our customers...)

> understand the urge to fork over the neglect of the GNU release, but for
> example, the current AFPL release 7.00 already has half of the ICC
> support implemented, so adding that to the 5.50 or even 6.51 releases is
> already duplicated effort. We'd love to have you help out on the AFPL
> version instead, if you're willing to trust that we'll eventually free
> the relevant codebase.

That's the problem - the code *must* be free when we have completed it.
It will be part of CUPS 1.2 and will also be used by the image file RIP
in CUPS.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products                  mike at easysw.com
Printing Software for UNIX                       http://www.easysw.com