[illumos-Developer] picpack?!?

[Garrett D'Amore]

On Sun, 2010-08-29 at 10:14 -0500, Gary Mills wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 09:19:34PM -0700, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> > I was looking at some old stuff that I meant to take care of before I
> > left Oracle, and one them was cleaning up a bunch of the old postscript
> > filters for file formats not used anymore.
> > 
> > See bugid https://www.illumos.org/issues/111
> > 
> > There was a PSARC case on this that I filed months ago too... PSARC
> > 2009/586 I think.  
> > 
> > I think I can nuke picpack as well... if you think so too, please let me
> > know.
> 
> What does it do?  I can't find a man page for that one.

Its used potentially with dpost to take nroff pic format data and
generate postscript.  That said, dpost itself doesn't use it.  It was an
alternate method that people could use, but I don't think anyone ever
did.

> 
> > One of my little side goals is to make illumos carry less baggage, and
> > this would be the first part of a larger project to eliminate lpsched.
> > (We have cups for printing now.)
> 
> We should be careful about upward compatibility here.  I know the
> default was changed in Opensolaris, but both methods remained.  If
> System V printing is open code, we should retain it, particularly if
> it's still the default for Solaris 11.

Oracle has planned to remove it for a while.  Actually, one of the
reasons why its still there is support for the legacy plot and other
related formats, but now that this is no longer needed (approved in an
arc case) I expect it to be removed.  Its mostly been about someone
having enough time to do the removal, I think.

	- Garrett