Portland print dialog explained

No, the Portland Print Dialog isn't about design by committee. It's about letting the platform provide the print dialog (as opposed to the toolkit). If you run a GNOME desktop that will probably mean a Gtk Print dialog. If you run a KDE desktop that will probably a dialog based on KDEPrint. Incidentally, there already is a Portland file dialog, and no it isn't designed by committee either (give it a try!).

To make these kind of dialogs really viable as a platform service there are still some barriers that need to climbed. In particular it will need to be possible to extend such a dialog in a toolkit-neutral and out-of-process way. That's currently not possible. I hope that we will be able to present a proof of concept of such an extensible dialog somewhen later this year. Until that happens it is indeed highly premature to talk about any of this in an LSB context.

Most of the other functionality currently provided by Portland's xdg-utils will be ready well in time for LSB 3.2 though. So there are enough other interesting Portland bits to talk about on LSB day 2!