[Development] QPrinter Maintainer

[John Layt]

Hi,

I've been appointed as the new maintainer for QPrinter so I thought it would 
be a good idea to introduce myself and explain what the plans are for 
printing.

I'm a KDE hacker, where I'm maintainer for parts of our Locale, Date/Time and 
PIM library code, but also maintainer of the KDE additions to QPrintDialog 
pretty much as no-one else wanted to touch printing :-)  My day job is working 
on mainframes in the financial services sector which is about as far from the 
Qt/C++ world as you can get.  I make no pretence to being a great C++ hacker, 
or even a moderately good one, but I do care about printing support and have 
taken the maintainers role to ensure we can get some focus on solving the 
problems we have.  As such I see my role more as a co-ordinator and I'll be 
looking to the community for help in solving specific problems.  If you're 
interested in helping fix printing and have patches or ideas I'll be glad to 
hear from you.

For Qt 5.0, Lars and Gunnar have separated all the printing code into a new 
QtBase module called QPrinterSupport.  This module is marked as being Done and 
is intended to be replaced in Qt 5.1 or 5.2 with a new module and api that 
supports more modern printing features such as both 'push' and 'pull' 
workflows, colour management, and settings management.  The initial target 
will be supporting the full CUPS feature set on OSX and Linux, then trying to 
extend that support to Windows where possible.  I also have links into the 
OpenPrinting community and will be looking how to integrate their work as 
well.

See http://developer.qt.nokia.com/groups/qt_contributors_summit/wiki/Printing 
for some more details.

I intend to start design work on this after I'm done with my QLocale related 
changes for 5.0.

The first step however is to do a bug triage and see what bugs we can fix for 
Qt 4.8/5.0.  I've had a quick skim through the 117 Open/Reported issues, and 
it's roughly a 50/50 split between bugs and feature requests, with a few 
duplicates and optimisations thrown in.  A few of the bugs have patches 
attached and could be quick-wins for the 4.8.0 release.

A few of those bugs are issues I can work on myself, mostly the Linux/CUPS 
related ones, but many of these bugs involve font, painting, Windows and OSX 
issues that lie well outside my expertise.  Any help people can give on these 
will be great.

In short: patches welcome!

Just a couple of admin points on the bug-tracker, I believe the granting of 
management rights to non-Nokians is a work in progress?  Also a lot of the 
bugs are assigned to Trond Kjernåsen who I believe is no longer involved in 
Qt?

Cheers!

John.