[Sugar-devel] Print Support proposal (need input) Beta

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

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Vamsi Krishna Davuluri wrote:
> But as tomeu had pointed out, what of the schools without servers? In that
> case printing would have a need to be done from the laptops themselves.

Yes.  There are lots of potential use cases that you might support, but
you will not be able to support them all.  I am suggesting that you
approach this as a "critical path" problem.  Do the absolute minimum
amount of work necessary to achieve useful functionality in some
situations, and then grow it from there.

> And personally I would definitely prefer a client-server approach as it
> simplifies many things. But shouldn't the print-to-pdf be a good addition?
> In my opinion that would at least give the kids something through which they
> can display their presentations to the real world.

I agree the ability to convert things to PDF would be nice to have.  I
even proposed it as a feature of the Journal in June:
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2008-June/006598.html

What I am saying here is: conversion to PDF within Sugar is not on the
critical path to working print support.

> one question, the school server will be running on a normal distro, or
> sugar?

The school server is running a normal distribution, probably headless.

> I believe pdf printing should be present on the laptops at least, so I will
> push it as an end derivable.

Well, that's fine.  I just want to warn you against putting too many
things into one Summer of Code proposal.  Remember: most Summer of Code
projects fail, because the project is too big and the code never reaches
sufficient quality to be merged into the main codebase.

- --Ben
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