[Server-devel] 9.1 Proposal: Printing support

[Martin Langhoff]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 12:03 AM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at laptop.org> wrote:
> I think we're on the same page here.  For 9.1, what's the *least* work
> we can do to get *something* done on the printing front?

Fantastic!

> Once the
> basics are out there, hopefully we'll have community motivated to take
> it "the rest of the way", whatever that is.

Hmmm, this needs a serious think and a design. It's not an incremental
step-at-a-time progress thing that we can expect the community
naturally take on. Strong design-and-code leads emerge less
frequently, and this is an important aspect of getting this feature to
work well.

OTOH, would love to see someone prepared to prove me wrong :-)

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 1:57 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.

I definitely want to have a service announcement scheme for the XO to discover:

 - what services are offered in the network
 - by which server
 - some additional arbitrary metadata (version, supported extensions
for example)
 - reasonably scalable - chatty stuff squandering network resources is
something we cannot have
 - optionally non-trivially-spoofable (not sure if this is reasonable to expect)

in short, something a notch or two up from hardcoding "local" dns
names. Douglas has been looking into mdns/avahi (for the activity
installer control panel) -- and from what he saw in the initial review
I'm not 200% convinced. By which I mean I want to review it a bit
more, perhaps it's indeed the best scheme, but it sure looked chatty.

So I guess that's one proposal for this 9.1 series. The printing
proposal would then use this service (or DNS if we fail to
deliver!).The XS side needs a fully fledged automagically configuring
cups setup which is not entirely trivial.

cheers,



m
-- 
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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