ppdi not merging common content from multiple PPDs?
Michael Sweet
msweet at apple.com
Tue Mar 3 11:08:51 PST 2009
On Mar 3, 2009, at 7:49 AM, Smith Kennedy wrote:
> ...
> If this is expected behavior (I seem to recall finding in my
> thrashing that it is),
It is currently the expected behavior; optimizing the output is on our
TODO list but hasn't yet happened.
> it isn't clear to me what value ppdi is providing. The primary
> value I can see in using the CUPS DDK is the ability to inherit
> common elements. But if those commonalities have to be identified
> by hand, because ppdi cannot do it itself, that makes it much more
> difficult to adopt the CUPS DDK for PPD development, particularly if
> there are already large numbers of existing PPDs that one might want
> to import.
That is definitely an issue; one possible path to take is to import
the first model in a series and then add sub-blocks for each variation
- in my experience most new models are almost identical to their
predecessors.
> I thought the problem might be that the files were not "normalized",
> so tried importing one using ppdi and then re-generating it using
> ppdc, and did the same thing for the second one. Interestingly,
> ppdi refused to import the ppds generated by ppdc.
What errors did you see?
> My questions are these:
> 1) did ppdi used to be able to do this inheritance analysis itself?
> If so, why was it removed?
ppdi has never done any optimization on the generated .drv file.
> 2) regardless of past history, can ppdi be fixed to do this?
Yes, the key issue is implementing the optimizations efficiently. A 1-
level pass (just put all of the common stuff at the top and only
encode differences in sub-blocks) should be fairly easy and quick, but
doing multiple levels is tricky.
> 3) why won't ppdi import a ppd created by ppdc from another database?
I don't know, it certainly should! Again, any errors?
> 4) What workflow was envisioned for the CUPS DDK? Am I just using
> it improperly?
The DDK (and in particular the PPD compiler) has always been primarily
a PPD creation tool. Importing existing PPDs is supposed to be a one-
time thing, after which you just work with the drv and po/strings file
(s).
________________________________________
Michael R Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer
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