Announcing printerd

I suppose you have a way to manage the print spool centrally rather then trying to deal with lock files and whatnot to avoid race conditions when you have lots of programs kicking off print jobs simultaneously.

Normally I am happy to see new developments, but I personally really don't understand the point. The 'print spool' itself has never been much of a problem.

It's the printers themselves and the applications needed to properly support print jobs.

Like: I have to print labels in a automated manner on a Xerox Laser using PCL. Or a home label maker. Or if I want to use a Lexmark printer in Linux or the dozens and dozens of things that Linux tends to really suck at.

The task 'Add or remove pdfs from print spool' doesn't strike me as a problem that users had to overcome in the past. Other then the fact that the GUIs for selecting printers and printer features are miserable, tend to be missing controls, and have no consistency.

> why does this need to be a daemon at all? What gain is there from a constantly running process rather than an executable launched when required?

From the dbus homepage:

> D-Bus […] makes it simple […] to launch applications and daemons on demand when their services are needed.