ghostscript : better to working together ?

[Michael Sweet]

Didier Link wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> I'm the official maintener of GNU-Ghostscript and I received some
> messages about why continue to have 3 different versions of
> ghostscript.

GNU Ghostscript as in the FSF version, or GNU Ghostscript as in the
official GPL Ghostscript distribution from Artifex?

> I've begin to contact the Artifex developpers and I do the same here.
> 
> 
> So, can you explain me the main differences between esp-gs and
> GNU/GPL version (that's mainly the same code base). I understand the
> need to easysoftware to have a better flexibility with esp-gs but
> maybe it's possibly be based on the GNU or GPL codebase for a lesser
> confusion for the users ?

The only reason ESP Ghostscript exists is because of the historical
time lag between AFPL Ghostscript and GPL Ghostscript.  Because of
that lag, GPL Ghostscript often contained numerous bugs, and each
Linux distro was maintaining a separate set of patches and drivers
against the latest GPL release.

The current ESP Ghostscript has two subdirectories containing add-on
drivers.  The first is the pstoraster subdirectory for the CUPS-specific
stuff.  The second is called "addons" and contains all other GPL drivers
that are not part of GPL Ghostscript.

There are additional changes (and I'm probably forgetting some here -
do a diff to see all of the changes):

     - configure.ac and Makefile.in have been improved with more
       configurable options.
     - Support was added for dynamically-loaded drivers (mainly for
       the x11 driver, but I think a few other drivers support the
       DSO interface too)
     - Changes to the lib/gs*.ps files; some bug fixes plus the
       NOMEDIAATTRS option needed by CUPS
     - Changes to the zmedia interface to remove the page size
       dictionary matching, since this dictionary is not populated
       by *any* Ghostscript driver and prevents the proper size
       selection (e.g. Letter is used over A4, even when A4 is
       set via setpagedevice...)
     - New CJKV support code.

Anyways, we'd love to get all of the ESP Ghostscript stuff into GPL
Ghostscript ASAP.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Publishing Software        http://www.easysw.com