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From: wcs@anchor.ho.att.com (Bill Stewart +1-908-949-0705)
Subject: Re: How to vote on POSIX Printing
Organization: Electronic Birdwatching Society
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1993 04:26:24 GMT
Message-ID: <WCS.93Mar9232624@rainier.ATT.COM>
In-Reply-To: terry@cs.weber.edu's message of Wed, 10 Mar 93 02:58:32 GMT
References: <C37x6s.88x@ra.nrl.navy.mil> <1993Mar9.183158.7265@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
<C3n7p5.Hpn@ra.nrl.navy.mil> <1993Mar10.025832.17665@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
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In article <1993Mar10.025832.17665@fcom.cc.utah.edu> terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:
In article <C3n7p5.Hpn@ra.nrl.navy.mil> atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil (Randall Atkinson) writes:
>In article <1993Mar9.183158.7265@fcom.cc.utah.edu> terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:
>>Crufty API's are better than >*no*< API's.
>
> This is the crux of our disagreement.
>
> I firmly believe that "No standard is better than a bad standard."
>and the corollary "Crufty APIs in any standard are evil.". There are
>a lot of people who believe in those two assertions (independent of
>whether those folks happen to think the proposed POSIX printing APIs
>are crufty). This is based on bad experiences being forced to use
>bad standards because they were standard.
I still maintain that anything that works is better than anything that
doesn't. I have to agree that this is where we disagree. 8-).
I've also worked on projects that had to support bad standards, and
also to support bad non-standards that the customer thought his users wanted.
It's bad.
Meanwhile, if you *want* a crufty API for the Berkeley lp system, you can use:
sprintf(lprcmd, "lpr %s", filename); system(lprcmd) ;
or popen("lpr", "w");
and you can build a similar crufty api for System V lp ....
I'm currently working on a project that needs a little better than this,
though not by much; the people we're interfacing to use an
NIS Yeller Pages map to describe the available printers,
and I'll probably adopt their technique.
Palladium may be better, but there would be too many things to change
at this point, and it's easy to replace the script named "lpr"
--
# Pray for peace; Bill
# Bill Stewart 1-908-949-0705 wcs@anchor.att.com AT&T Bell Labs 4M312 Holmdel NJ
# Sacrifice is when you give up something valuable that's *yours*.
# Making other people give up valuable things of *theirs* is called
# other things :-) Keep your politicians honest out there!