Re: w32 issues

["Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:30:25 +0100
>> From: "Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>
>> CC: dhruva <dhruvakm@gmail.com>, emacs-devel@gnu.org, 
>>  Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,
>>  Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>
>>
>> Jason and Eli, I think at least the first problem should be in 
>> FOR-RELEASE. What do you think?
> 
> You mean that printing is broken?  I don't agree with your wording,
> but I have no objections to saying something like "Emacs will hang if
> the user tries to print to a port that has no printer device connected
> to it."

Well, we have had long discussions about printing on w32 and AFAICS we 
came to the conclusion that Emacs does not follow the w32 API for 
printing. Changing that requires that Emacs should use the GDI API:s for 
printing and that seems to be a lot of work.

I do not think it is enough just put something like that in the manual. 
Instead I think the user should be warned when they try to print because 
at that moment they can loose unsaved work if Emacs hangs completely.

Is there any reason not to do that? Any user that tries to print in 
Emacs on w32 have a big chance for trouble. It can appearantly work in 
some cases (due to a lot of job by you and others I guess), but the 
chances that it will not work are still very big. At least that is my 
guess. We have the problems above and those we have mentioned before:

- Any printer that can be used might be in a bad state.

- It looks like we do not fully understand how networked printers can be 
handled (since we do not use the printing API:s like they should be used).

- Windows users will at home often have a printer limited to GDI 
printing that are connected through USB since those tends to be cheaper.