Return to BSD News archive
Xref: sserve comp.org.usenix:3293 comp.unix.bsd:11658 comp.org.sug:674 comp.os.386bsd.misc:91
Newsgroups: comp.org.usenix,comp.unix.bsd,comp.org.sug,comp.os.386bsd.misc
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!sdd.hp.com!saimiri.primate.wisc.edu!caen!hellgate.utah.edu!fcom.cc.utah.edu!cs.weber.edu!terry
From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C)
Subject: Re: How to vote on POSIX Printing
Message-ID: <1993Mar10.172755.27350@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
Sender: news@fcom.cc.utah.edu
Organization: Weber State University (Ogden, UT)
References: <C3n7p5.Hpn@ra.nrl.navy.mil> <1993Mar10.025832.17665@fcom.cc.utah.edu> <WCS.93Mar9232624@rainier.ATT.COM>
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 93 17:27:55 GMT
Lines: 56
In article <WCS.93Mar9232624@rainier.ATT.COM> wcs@anchor.ho.att.com (Bill Stewart +1-908-949-0705) writes:
>In article <1993Mar10.025832.17665@fcom.cc.utah.edu> terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:
> 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"
Ever use a NeXT machine and picked a printer from a list of printers as a
user and had the whole thing "just work"? THAT'S what an API buys you.
What portable "API" do I have for listing available resources, manipulating
jobs, or checking status, let alone specifying alternate printers on the
command line of the "API" you suggest so that it works on both SVR4 and
BSD style command sets? The answer better be "none" without Palladium or
something like it.
Ever wrote a program to do printing on a VMS system? You can do *everything*
you need to to maximize the user's choices (without the user needing to know
the intracacies of, or even commands for, the print system) *programmatically*
through well-defined API's. Isn't it about time UNIX could compete with
VMS in the area of print services?
The same applies to NeXT; unless there is a standardized interface to
compete with the services available, UNIX is headed for trouble.
Come up with a better system and present it; but plain old lp/lpr just
don't cut it. They require too much of the user in an applications
environment. UNIX has to compete with MS Windows, not IBM MVS.
Terry Lambert
terry@icarus.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have an 8 user poetic license" - me
Get the 386bsd FAQ from agate.berkeley.edu:/pub/386BSD/386bsd-0.1/unofficial
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------