9.1 Proposal: Printing support

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 8:57 AM,  <pgf at laptop.org> wrote:
> can's mdns/avahi help with discovery?  it'd be a shame to have to
> manually configure a server address or name.

DNS-SD is the Right Answer (which is not exactly the same thing as
mdns).  But getting a standard "one school server, and a classroom of
XOs" solution in place for 9.1 using a standard name ("printer", say)
would be a good first step; we can handle autodiscovery (via CUPs or
something else) for 9.2.

I hope it is clear that I'm not saying that we will *never* do
autodiscovery or "more fancy" printing features; I'm just trying to
ensure that *something* useful to *someone* lands in 9.1, ideally in a
way that isn't completely broken from a design perspective.  There's a
lot of activity work to be done to enable printing from the various
activities; I'd like that to be able to happen concurrently in the 9.2
timeframe with efforts to improve printer discovery, setup, etc.

We should not ignore the fact that OLPCs are deployed in places like
Birmingham and Montevideo, which have abundant access to paper and
printers.
  --scott

-- 
                         ( http://cscott.net/ )