Hi Fabian. Il 11/11/2013 22:57, Fabian Gundlach ha scritto: > Hi, > > what do you think about integrating a printing interface into CMS (i.e. > contestants print by submitting a file to the CWS)? > > I think it might be a bit easier to enforce printing policies (each > contestant > should print at most x pages in total and each print job should have at most > y > pages, contestants should not mess around with the printer settings) and add > some header stating where to deliver the print job. Most of these things > could > be implemented once and then be reused at every contest. It is something we thought at least some times, especially just before IOI 2012. Unfortunately CUPS turns out to be very unreliable, unflexible and messy to configure. We didn't have manpower enough to make something better, and then we lost interest after IOI 2012. > I'm not sure how printing has been handled at past IOIs. Did you set up some > kind of "shared virtual printer" in CUPS, that adds the header and forwards > to > the real printer? Yes; at least we tried, because CUPS has a lot of shortcomings on configurability. > Direct printer access would only have to be established on the contest server > if we support printing via the web interface. > > During recent IOI and ICPC competitions it seems to have become a "tradition" > that printing didn't work as expected at least during the practice session > :). > I don't know what the reasons for these issues were, but maybe some of them > could be avoided in the future if we restrict to more "basic" printing via > CWS? It may be. I remember that it worked like this in in Zagreb 2007, when I was a contestant. I think they used a2ps to format text. > We should at least support printing text files (with automatic source code > formatting) and pdf files. Most usual application printing dialogs can export > to pdf, I guess, so contestants could in principle still print anything they > want. Personally, I think it may be an interesting experiment, although I hardly think it will get rid of all the problems. :-P I don't think I'll have time to spend on this issue; there are other things in CMS which I would like to fix before. In case you or someone want to give it a try, my first suggestion would be to start working independently from CMS, since I expect the code to be completely independent except for the Web interface. > A fixed user-printer association might be desirable for example in the case > that the contestants are distributed across multiple rooms and there is one > printer in each room. > > By the way, a few germany IOI coaches are meeting this weekend to hack on the > contest system. For example we are writing a german importer format. More on > this later... Good to know! If you want to get in touch in real-time with me or some of other core developers, just drop us a private email and we arrange something. Giovanni. -- Giovanni Mascellani <mascellani@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Pisa, Italy Web: http://poisson.phc.unipi.it/~mascellani Jabber: g.mascellani@xxxxxxxxxx / giovanni@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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