Comment 1 for bug 393818
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| Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst) wrote | #1 |
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0e1f616
(Get the code!)
Some history lesson:
The LC_PAPER environment variable was not part of the original POSIX standard.
To tackle the default papersize problem the Debian operation system gave birth to libpaper (/etc/papersize), most programs in Debian/Ubuntu use libpaper to retrieve the paper size, CUPS is also compiled with libpaper support.
Later a DRAFT specification of a newer POSIX standard included the LC_PAPER environment variable, glibc was based on this DRAFT specification. But the FINAL version of this POSIX standard didn't include the LC_PAPER environment variable, this is also the current POSIX standard version (http://
So both methods can be used by application developers depending if they target POSIX compliance or only Linux compliance. In Debian/Ubuntu we could agree on any of these methods and adapt all programs to use this method. Furthermore this effort would be limited to Debian/Ubuntu only as long as there is no new POSIX standard that clearly describes how the default papersize should be retrieved.