Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 8746
printtool doesn't cope well with no printer attached
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:54 EDT
If you try to print directly to the port, but realise that, being a new user, you'd forgotten to attach the printer, what are you supposed to do? Printtool is waiting to print, and doesn't seem to have any mechanism for timeout out. How about waiting for (say) 10 seconds, and after that sending a signal to printf? Which brings me to the second part of this bug report: if you get printtool into this state, and then send a signal to printf (even just by stracing it), you get a 'success' message. Hardly appropriate. Can't this all be changed? I realise that work is underway with print-config, but as I understand it, (a) it won't be ready in time for 6.2, and (b) the front end has only been done for KDE at the moment (sorry if I'm wrong). Besides, printtool is what is invoked by control-panel.
Not familiar enough with tcl (which is used for printtool) to come up with a real fix in time for 6.2 - in 7.0, printtool won't be there in any case. As for printer-config, it will be ready for 6.2, and while it relies on Qt and kdelibs, it can be used from within any environment (except for the console for now, same as printtool).