[Development] Plans for printing in 5.3 onwards

[Knoll Lars]

On 17/02/14 13:47, "John Layt" <jlayt at kde.org> wrote:

>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?

I¹ve been discussing a bit with Friedemann and Andy on IRC, and I¹m
willing to give this change set an exception to the feature freeze. The
reason is that I believe that this significantly improves our level of
support in this area, and that the patch set is almost there.

The API is pretty much ok now, so there won¹t be a lot more changes coming
anymore. The main thing that¹s missing is bug fixing certain areas, and
that¹s what the stabilisation period is there for.

So please go ahead with your changes so that we can get them in within the
next few days.

Cheers,
Lars