I have been loosely following the GNOME print project for
some time now and have as part of that been getting more
and more suprised at the multitude of solutions for
printing under Linux/Unix that are developed in
competition/ignorance of eachother.
The only consolidation that I have seen currently seem to be
on the idea or talk stage. Most noteably there has been
talk during the last 3-4 months about integrating Gimp-
print, the IBM drivers project, Ghostscript and VA printing
development with GNOME Print. The level of integration
between these modules are yet to be determined and it seems
politics as much as technical issues will determine the
final outcome.
Another printing project with which integration as been
discussed is CUPS, but it seem like many people dislike the
business model behind CUPS, combined with low printing
quality.(Never tested personally so I have no knowledge of
correctnes of printing quality claims.)
Another printing project is called Xprint, which SUN is
backing. Don’t know much about it though, but it seems
pretty basic (aka Postscript output only) to me.
In addition to these projects there are a host of
others, personally I hope most of these projects will merge
into
one hell of a great system over time instead of resulting
in a multitude of low quality/low amount of drivers
solutions.
Disclaimer: I use the work integration is a very
loose sense here :), including just adding support for
library this or that.