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From: David Chappell <David.Chappell@trincoll.edu> Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 19:24:19 -0400 Subject: PPR: The Future of PPR In August I wrote that here at Trinity College doubts had been raised about the value of continued development of PPR and whether such work should continue at Trinity. I thought I should inform you that those doubts have been laid to rest. PPR will continue to have a place here at Trinity for the forseable future. I would like to thank those of you who wrote testimonials in support of the project. They were useful not just in the near term, but in the future too since they included a lot of good material which I intend to use in presentations here at Trinity. One or two of your applications were quite unusual. I am interested in exploring the question of what can be done to enlarge the PPR user community. While looking for material to justify the project, I discovered that about half of the posters to the mailing list are in France. I imagine that this might have something to do with Olivier Tharan created a French translation of the user interface. It seems likely that additional translations could open PPR up to a broader user community. I am working on a Russian translation, but Russian is a second language for me so the work is proceding slowly. Another area that could increase the appeal of PPR is better documentation. All of the existing documentation has been written by me. Since I have also written 99.9% of PPR, I am not in a good position to see where the gaps in the documentation are. If you, the users, could point out things that need explaining, especially things that could be stumbling blocks for new users or discourage people from creating add-on-modules for PPR, please let me know. Of course, if you would like to provided actually documentation, that would be even better. Version 1.52 was released on the 26th of September. I haven't heard a peep about it, so maybe I have worked out all of the bugs of the new build system. Or maybe you are all sticking with version 1.51. If you sent a message either to me or to the mailing list during the last week of September and the first week of October, it may have been lost. We had some e-mail server problems. Things were pretty crazy here during the last eight weeks, what with the students coming back and bringing all of those infected computers with them. But things have calmed down and I have been able to spend a few days working on PPR. I have finally been able to implement a feature that is dear to my heart and too long delayed. That is the ability to query a printer, deteremine its make and model, and select an appropriate PPD file. I think that this feature to go a long way toward my goal of making PPR as easy to configure as possible. I am even considering adding automatic PPD file download with online repositories. If you are interested, the new code is in the CVS repository on Sourceforge.net. The new commands are "ppad ppdq" and "ppad ppd query". Another area of promise is IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) support. PPR already has an experimental IPP server. When PPR supports IPP, we will be able to use many nifty tools created for CUPS to say nothing of close integreation with KDE. I would like to know what you, the list members, think should be future directions of the PPR project? How could these goals be best accomplished? ================================================================ David Chappell David.Chappell@Mail.Trincoll.Edu Computing Center Postmaster@Mail.Trincoll.Edu Trinity College (860) 297-2114 Hartford, Connecticut 06106 U.S.A.