=version 2.2.k= Harry G. McGavran found an interesting interaction between Berkeley lpd and magicfilter, where both magicfilter and lpd want to reap magicfilter’s children, and sometimes magicfilter doesn’t win. In particular, when magicfilter couldn’t reap the m4 process, it would fail with a complaint about m4 terminating abnormally. In the case of executing m4, the program would have already failed with a message about m4 not being there, so reaping the return value wasn’t necessary.
As a little something extra, the `--srcdir` feature now works so
you can untar **magicfilter** into directory _A_ and build it
in directory _B_ by simply `cd`ing into _B_ and doing
_A/_**configure.sh**. At least it works on Linux and FreeBSD.
=version 2.2.j= 2.2.k should have been 2.2.j, but I set the version tag BEFORE I committed all the changes that now make up 2.2.k. This is a lesson that trying to do changes when you have a fever of 102f may not lead to the most robust code on the planet.
=version 2.2.g=
Harry G. McGavran, Jr. of LANL
reported a bunch of bugs with the
m4 part of magicfilter; The first one was that I had forgotten to
quote a defn() in
magic.m4.in, so
printers that wanted to pass GS_OPTIONS to ghostscript weren’t
actually doing that. While fixing that (a trivial fix) he then pointed
out (indirectly)
that I wasn’t properly quoting a large bunch of ifdef()s either.
He then suggested that I modify
magicfilter could it could be used as a filter to remote printers
when the line printer daemon didn’t support filters on them, so I added
a PRINTER capacity to the .def files (this is a command to pipe
printer-ready output to instead of simply piping it to stdout. With
this and a front-end printer daemon that tries to print to /dev/null,
even dumb lpds can be magicfiltered.
After I finished this, I added better support for printing **PDF**
files both on postscript and non-postscript files, plus I now
check for `hp2pcl` or `lj2ps` during configuration so
that **PCL** files at least have a chance of being printable on
non-PCL printers (`hp2pcl` and `lj2ps` only support
**pcl 4**, so you need to give `configure.sh` the
`--with-pcl` flag to enable this feature.)
=version 2.2.f=
I’d been having trouble getting magicfilter to configure on <a
Solaris systems, and very
recently I’d found that it wouldn’t configure on pell
(SLS Linux, with /bin/sh linked to
base 1.13.1
either. So, after getting a report of what turned out to be
Yet Another New Solaris Bug, I went back and looked at the
configuration system and found about six places where Things Were
Not Working. They’re fixed now, and magicfilter now builds
on a Solaris box without having to cheat by using ksh
=version 2.2.e=
Every application needs a --version option. 2.2.d added that
option, and 2.2.e makes that option actually work under LPRng,
as well as fixing a bug that makes magicfilter dump core when
it’s called without any arguments or a bogus printer filter
under LPRng.
=version 2.2.c=
A bug report came in describing a bizarre problem with
2.2.b on a
Slackware Linux 8.1 system where
magicfilter just wouldn’t print while the builtin filters for
LPRng did without complaint. Eventually I tracked down the
source of the bug to that installation’s LPRng not wanting to
run filters unless they were in /usr/libexec/filters, but in
the progress a small collection of buglets were discovered and squished,
plus the configuration script now detects LPRng and builds a version of
magicfilter that does not process options passed in to the filter
(LPRng passes a LOT of options, which seem to change over
time. magicfilter doesn’t use them, so we just ignore them now.)
=version 2.2.b=
2.2.a Fixed a lot of the Irix-won’t-build bugs, but didn’t get
all of them: I was doing ${foo:+"bar"} to build a string, which
works fine on my main development platforms
Mastodon Linux and
FreeBSD) but not quite so well
on Irix. So, with a heavy sigh, a new Monday creates a new
magicfilter release.
=version 2.2.a= 2.1 didn’t build on Irix, due to a collection of things which gcc likes but the Irix C compiler didn’t and things which didn’t work exactly the same way between BSD, GNU, and Irix utilities. This fixes them, at least on the SGI I’ve got access to.
=version 2.1.b=
This contains a bunch of little tweaks.
* magicfilter now supports different papersizes where applicable;
the --with-papersize= option to configure.sh allows you to
build a version of magicfilter that supports A4 and
US Letter pagesizes (this is a restriction of
nenscript; the versions of nenscript I have on
Mastodon and FreeBSD only support those two pagesizes.
* The reject() function now returns error status 2 instead
of 1, because Berkeley lpd interprets error status 1 as a
request to try and reprint the job.
=version 2.1.a=
This version adds support for fifo handing in filters – if a
filter contains the magic token ${FILE}, output from that
filter will be directed through a named pipe to avoid diagnostic
messages cluttering it up. Old versions of
Ghostscript
may suffer from this problem (though I’ve never seen it.)
=version 2.0.i= This version fixes some pretty nasty bugs that I managed to never encounter because my network doesn’t, amazingly enough, trigger any of those conditions for me.
=version 2.0.g= Broken. It has the annoying feature that it doesn’t return error status from subprocesses, so it will successfully print, then lie and say it doesn’t, which can lead to some hilarious paper wasting.
=version 2.0.f= Also broken. But probably amusing if you’re looking to see how clean, precise, and broken my coding can be.
=version 2.0.e= Also also broken. Old.
=version 2.0.d= Really broken. Older.
=version 2.0.c= Yup, you guessed it. Broken. Oldest.