[Xprint] xprint 009 and firefox 0.8

[Roland Mainz]

avorop at mail.ru wrote:
> Printing of russian text from firefox (or mozilla) does not work. Today
> I've found one posting that suggests to print thru Xprt. So, I've
> installed xprint 009. This really fixed the problem for mozilla. But
> firefox 0.8 still does not work. There, no printing is done at all.
> Printing dialog shows me all printers, just like in Mozilla, but then
> printer does not get any data for printing. Most likely it is internal
> problem of firefox, but I wanted to ask here first, just in case someone
> has heard something similar already.

The problem you're hitting is a bug in the gcc compiler version used to
compile the official Mozilla.org FireFox 0.8 build. I filed
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233497 ("Strange xprint
printing behaviour ((null) in printer list)") a while ago after many
complaints hit my inbox (you're No. 62 since FireFox 0.8 was released...
;-( ).

The actual problem is that some time before the FireFox 0.8 release the
default optimisation switch was changed to "-Os" (instead of "-O2")
which causes some Xprint-specific code which queries the paper size
names to be miscompiled. The result was that FireFox's Xprint module was
still working unless you change the paper size (that's the reason why
this bug was not affecting everyone - you have to go to the print job
options dialog first before you hit this bug) - the miscompiled code
always generated invalid paper names so the Xprint module refused to
print with the error code "requested paper size not supported for this
printer". However the error code was never shown to the user thanks to
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=234982
("nsPrintEngine::ShowPrintErrorDialog() fails in many cases").
Both issues are fixed now so both the current FireFox nightly builds and
the upcoming FireFox 0.9 release should be working, FireFox 0.8 builds
from other sources than Mozilla.org should work without problems unless
they have been compiled with "-Os", too.

Additionally I have build own FireFox 0.8 release binaries (incl CTL and
SVG support, see
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/0.8.html) for
Linux/x86:
- Normal GTK1 build:
 
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.8/contrib/firefox-0.8-i686-pc-linux-gnu-ctl-svg.tar.gz
 
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.8/contrib/firefox-0.8-i686-pc-linux-gnu-ctl-svg.readme

- Xft-enabled GTK1 build:
 
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.8/contrib/firefox-0.8-i686-pc-linux-gnu-ctl-svg-xft.tar.gz
 
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.8/contrib/firefox-0.8-i686-pc-linux-gnu-ctl-svg-xft.readme

- Normal GTK2 build
 
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.8/contrib/firefox-0.8-i686-pc-linux-gnu-ctl-svg-gtk2.tar.gz
 
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.8/contrib/firefox-0.8-i686-pc-linux-gnu-ctl-svg-gtk2.readme

- Xft-enabled GTK2 build:
 
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.8/contrib/firefox-0.8-i686-pc-linux-gnu-ctl-svg-gtk2-xft.tar.gz
 
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.8/contrib/firefox-0.8-i686-pc-linux-gnu-ctl-svg-gtk2-xft.readme

Another annoying bug for Solaris users was
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=235913 ("Random crashes
while printing on Solaris") but I recompiled my FireFox 0.8 builds and
uploaded the fixed builds to ftp.mozilla.org (the Linux/x86 builds
listed above include the same patch):
- Normal GTK1 build:
 
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.8/contrib/firefox-0.8-sparc-sun-solaris2.8-ctl-svg.tar.gz
 
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.8/contrib/firefox-0.8-sparc-sun-solaris2.8-ctl-svg.readme

- Normal GTK2 build:
 
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.8/contrib/firefox-0.8-sparc-sun-solaris2.8-gtk2.tar.gz
 
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.8/contrib/firefox-0.8-sparc-sun-solaris2.8-gtk2.tar.gz

BTW: Both issues (that Xprint was broken in FireFox and the Solaris
crasher) were known long before 0.8 was released... but the people
posted the bug reported to web forums instead of Mozilla.org's bugzilla.
Therefore: PLEASE PLEASE file bugs at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ when
you see them. If the engineers working on the code don't know about the
bugs then they can#t fix them.

To bryner:
Is it possible to add an item for
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233497 to the FireFox 0.8
release notes (e.g. "Printing with Xprint is broken in the two official
Linux/x86 release builds due bug 233497. Please use the contributed
builds xyz-1, xyz-2, xyz-3 etc. instead...") ? As I said, this was
number 62... ;-(

----

Bye,
Roland

-- 
  __ .  . __
 (o.\ \/ /.o) roland.mainz at nrubsig.org
  \__\/\/__/  MPEG specialist, C&&JAVA&&Sun&&Unix programmer
  /O /==\ O\  TEL +49 2426 901568 FAX +49 2426 901569
 (;O/ \/ \O;)