Addition : Ink Level

[David Zeuthen]

On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 12:54 +0000, Tim Waugh wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 23, 2004 at 12:09:09PM -0000, Hughes R Mr (UG - Electronic Eng) wrote:
> 
> > I currently have no way of checking my ink level (for a epson
> > printer) in FC3 without compiling and installing other programs such
> > as epsutil. Surly an enterprise class distribution such as FC3
> > should have some kind of ink monitor in the main distribution.
> 
> See bug #120331, "RFE:  Add mtink, an Epson ink cartridge monitor".
> The concern here is adding lots of little utilities without binding
> them together with a useful interface.
> 

Do you mean User Interface or Application Programmers Interface? :-) 

I do think that hal is the right way to expose the API since the object
model representing hardware in hal is pretty much designed to export a
lot of different information (see hal-device-manager).

The code for polling for e.g. Epson printers, XYZ printers or whatever
shouldn't be a part of the hal codebase proper as it's pretty specific
to certain hardware. However there are ways to start other daemons from
the hal daemon (e.g. callouts when the hal daemon is starting up).

The key thing is that such software populate the same device properties
on the hal device object representing the printer, and of course that
said properties are well documented and generic enough to represent a
wide range of different hardware.

> Perhaps this is an area that eggcups could expand into -- or should it
> be in the tool for setting up print queues instead?
> 

Eggcups could be the preferred UI for e.g. the GNOME desktop, yeah.
Colin can probably enlighten us here.

Cheers,
David