*BSD News Article 12411


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From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C)
Subject: Re: How to vote on POSIX Printing
Message-ID: <1993Mar9.182300.7035@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
Sender: news@fcom.cc.utah.edu
Organization: Weber State University  (Ogden, UT)
References: <C36JrI.E8K@ra.nrl.navy.mil>
Date: Tue, 9 Mar 93 18:23:00 GMT
Lines: 59

In article <C36JrI.E8K@ra.nrl.navy.mil> atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil (Randall Atkinson) writes:
>  A few weeks back, during USENIX in fact, there was much discussion
>on the net of the POSIX intent to standardise the not widely used
>printing mechanisms defined by the Palladium system as the standard
>UNIX printing commands.
>
>  Palladium was at one time widely installed at MIT, but large
>portions of MIT removed it because Palladium was unusable.  Palladium
>is significantly different from the existing practice of System V's
>"lp" and friends and is also different from the existing practice of
>BSD's "lpr" and friends.  At the moment, the Palladium momentum
>appears to be coming from the Closed Software Foundation (OSF) as a
>way to make existing BSD and System V systems "non-standard" and to
>give the OSF companies a marketing advantage versus vendors who
>already have implemented either System V or BSD printing.

1)	You have been asked to keep your gerrymandering to yourself before.
2)	Your previous discussions have shown no knowledge of Palladium or
	other pull-queue oriented print systems.
3)	You have not offered another interface which provides programmatic
	rather than command line control of print facilities (ie: a library
	for print services functions).
4)	You are not correctly representing MIT's position on this, which
	they stated last time you posted this tripe.

It would be nice if you would do any three of the four above before foisting
your particular political views on the subject onto the rest of us.

>  I'd like to encourage all (especially folks who USE printing on a
>UNIX system) to join the balloting group and carefully vote on the
>ballot.  If you look it over and want to junk all of the existing
>practice that we know works reasonably well, then vote in favour of
>the standard.  If, however, you agree with those of us who believe in
>standardising existing practice that works reasonably well, you can
>vote no and provide comments on why you think that Palladium should be
>dropped in favour of lp/lpr/lprm/cancel/lpq/lpstat/lpadmin.

Obviously, you do not realize that these facilities can be implemented on
top of Palladium (and have been).  While I am not directly a supporter
of OSF (not personally being a member), I do approve of a number of things
they support (Motif, for instance).  Palladium is one of these things, but
OSF is a proponent of it, not it's inventor.

Yes, it would be better if a generic queue management system were defined
and print services based on top of that.  This is still at odds with your
argument for existing facilities.

Put up or shut up.

					Terry Lambert
					terry@icarus.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
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