[Development] Plans for printing in 5.3 onwards

[John Layt]

On Wednesday 12 Feb 2014 15:37:29 John Layt wrote:
> On Wednesday 12 Feb 2014 12:03:53 John Layt wrote:

> > Sorry, needed to wait until the full stack of changes had been completed
> > and integrated before pushing. The revised patches are up for review, I'm
> > not sure we'll get it done in time, but it's worth a crack, otherwise
> > I'll have to slog through the old code again fixing all the bugs I found
> > for 5.3, only to replace the code again in 5.4.
> 
> If people don't quite feel confident taking all the changes at once, one
> option is to take up Morten's earlier suggestion of not using the new
> platform plugin code just yet, i.e.
> * Merge the QPageLayout and QPageSize code and its use in QPrinter and
> QPrintEngine, as this is the code that fixes many bugs and removes the
> duplicated inconsistent code that is at the root of many issues.
> * Change the existing platform code to use QPageSize and QPageLayout
> internally
> * Merge the new QPA code, but don't use it as yet,and  have the auto tests
> and manual tests available for people to test it more thoroughly.
> * Keep the patches switching to the new platform plugin code in reserve to
> either switch for 5.3 if testing proves the plugin is stable enough, or more
> likely to use in 5.4 if not.

Hi,

As noted on the Releasing list, I didn't get the OSX 10.7 blocker bug fixed in 
time, and using just the layout code without the plugin proved too much work 
to be stable in time, so *none* of this change set has made it for 5.3.   
Apologies and thanks to everyone who put so much effort into testing and 
reviewing the changes.

The question is what to do now.  I could look at "porting" some of the layout 
fixes to the old code as bug fixes for 5.3, but I'm not sure that's the best 
use of my time, plus most of the fixes are heavily dependent on the new 
QPageSize class to manage things without writing the same page size conversion 
code over again in 8 different classes.

One option is to make the QPageSize and maybe QPageLayout classes private for 
5.3 to allow them to be used in bug fixes, which could also allow the new QPA 
class in be included for wider testing via tests/manual/qprintdevice_dump 
before being used in 5.4, but that feels like cheating the freeze.

Thoughts?

Cheers!

John.