Improving GUI printing in GuixSD: (python-)system-config-printer, worth adding?

Improving GUI printing in GuixSD: (python-)system-config-printer, worth adding?

[swedebugia]

Hi

Today I investigated a bit about this program.

system-config-printer is a Red hat offspin that is essentially a quick
python hack to be able to say "we have a desktop gui for printer
configuration".

Is it a useful program you think? Having used it on arch and debian I
found it somewhat buggy, ugly, unintuitive.

It does not seem to interact with the system bus in order to send
printer errors to the notification area. (I could be wrong about this)

One thing it does is give you easy access to the queue and to view print
related errors. Although cups errors are usually quite bad if you ask me
and I found I cannot really rely on it for restarting jobs etc.

CUPS seems to me like in the same category as TeX, it is old, scolded,
overly complicated, error prone and we use and rely on it ONLY because
we lack a well working GNU replacement.

--

system-config-printer depends on pycups and perhaps some polkit
pk-helper.

Unfortunately I found no build documentation in the repository and it
has not seen a release for a year.
https://github.com/zdohnal/system-config-printer

-- 
Cheers 
Swedebugia

Idea: guile-cups-notifier (Was: Re: Improving GUI printing in GuixSD: (python-)system-config-printer, worth adding?)

[swedebugia]

On 2019-01-16 14:43, swedebugia@riseup.net wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Today I investigated a bit about this program.
> 
> system-config-printer is a Red hat offspin that is essentially a quick
> python hack to be able to say "we have a desktop gui for printer
> configuration".
> 
> Is it a useful program you think? Having used it on arch and debian I
> found it somewhat buggy, ugly, unintuitive.
> 
> It does not seem to interact with the system bus in order to send
> printer errors to the notification area. (I could be wrong about this)
> 
> One thing it does is give you easy access to the queue and to view print
> related errors. Although cups errors are usually quite bad if you ask me
> and I found I cannot really rely on it for restarting jobs etc.
> 
> CUPS seems to me like in the same category as TeX, it is old, scolded,
> overly complicated, error prone and we use and rely on it ONLY because
> we lack a well working GNU replacement.
> 
> --
> 
> system-config-printer depends on pycups and perhaps some polkit
> pk-helper.
> 
> Unfortunately I found no build documentation in the repository and it
> has not seen a release for a year.
> https://github.com/zdohnal/system-config-printer

So if system-config-printer is an ugly python hack based on pycups, can
we do better in guile? (pycups is 95,9% written in C)

https://github.com/molefrog/cupsidity Is an alternative to pycups
written in C++ and contains only the basics of the CUPS API.

Keeping it simple we could make sure to ONLY add what Guix does not
provide: print queue management.

The idea is to make guile-cups bindings and a guile-cups-notifier that
interacts with CUPS via guile-ffi and does only a few things (and do
them well!):

* has a daemon running that reads the queue from cups
* prints messages to the user via dbus 

E.g. if the user sends something to the printer it pops up a message
"Printing: "document name" - click to cancel."

(cancelling a document is a nice feature and needed if the printer is
far away)

E.g. if an error occurs during printing it pops up a message displaying
the error. E.g. "Printing of "document name" failed: No paper found"

If printing succeed it prints: "Printing of "document name" finished."

Thoughts?
-- 
Cheers 
Swedebugia