AppleTalk FTW

Posted Jun 7, 2021 10:27 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: AppleTalk FTW by jccleaver
Parent article: Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

> It amazes me how much modern strife in the Linux world consists mostly of people trying to re-implement stuff Apple Computer handled pretty well by 1989 and only needed a few later tweaks to reduce chattiness.

Apple handled all of this so well that nearly every release of OSX required changes to printer drivers in order for existing printers to remain useful.

> I'm leery of efforts to remove simple, hard-configurable systems.

It turns out those "hard-configurable" systems weren't so "simple" after all.

> And if we have to keep drivers around to not require another five services on a simple Linux device that just needs to spit out some lp data,

Printing hasn't been a matter of "simply spitting out some lp data" since before "line printer" ceased to be a meaningful term in of itself.

AppleTalk FTW

Posted Jun 7, 2021 15:17 UTC (Mon) by jccleaver (guest, #127418) [Link] (1 responses)

> Apple handled all of this so well that nearly every release of OSX required changes to printer drivers in order for existing printers to remain useful.

You can go much further back than that. I'm old enough to remember System 6.0.8 having to be released solely because System 7's were incompatible with the previous ones and would force resets whenever a printer had to go back and forth between 6 and 7 users.

I'm referring mainly to printer local discovery, which was what Avahi/Zeroconf/etc have been trying to re-create for a while now.

I get the desire to press ahead with new printers in a new way, but as someone else wrote, there are the disposable printers you replace every 2 years, and forever printers that have been in service for decades. I'm not sure I trust the current desktop decision makers to take the latter property into account, given the last decade+ of Freedesktop decisions.

AppleTalk FTW

Posted Jun 7, 2021 16:52 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> I'm referring mainly to printer local discovery, which was what Avahi/Zeroconf/etc have been trying to re-create for a while now.

Sure, appletalk worked great... as long as you were using all-apple stuff. Windows discovery worked reasonably well.. as long as everything else was running Windows too. CUPS's local discovery worked equally well.

They all fell flat on their faces when you needed to cross ecosystems and the printer didn't speak a standard PDL (like postscript or HP-PCL)

> I'm not sure I trust the current desktop decision makers to take the latter property into account, given the last decade+ of Freedesktop decisions.

The "current desktop decision makers" (including Freedesktop.org) have nearly nothing to do with the standards and decisions of the OpenPrinting/PWG and IPP.