root / pykota / branches / specialauth / TODO

it's a pyt# $Id$

PyKota - Print Quotas for CUPS and LPRng

(c) 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 Jerome Alet <alet@librelogiciel.com>
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TODO, in no particular order :
        
        - Add a third settable price for printers : a minimal cost
          for a page, with a default value of 0.0. The value would
          be used instead of the computed price in the case of ink
          accounting if the computed price would be lower than this
          minimal price. The value wouldn't be used (yet?) for 
          normal page accounting.
          
        - Document the PYKOTA_HOME environment variable.
        
        - LDAP : See if setting cn=ThePrinter for user print quota entries
          could be done, only in the case where userquotabase=user
          (idem for groups). Would make direct modifications (e.g.
          with gq) more easy.
          
        - Allow the disabling of an user print quota entry without
          deleting it.
        
        - Store the value of the user's account balance in the
          printing history (the value at the time of printing) 
          as well as in the payments history (as a safety check
          in case an user complains).
          
        - PJL for non-networked backends (see ML's history)
        
        - Add the listing of the member printers in pkprinters if the printer
          is a printer group.
          
        - Allow several levels of administrative priviledges by allowing
          files like ~pykota/pykotadmin.someusername.conf (readonly by
          user 'someusername'), and have the database server deal
          with the permissions : no need for additionnal code or data
          in PyKota's database !
        
        - Try to talk to education based distribution coordinators
          (SambaEdu, SkoleLinux, K12LTSP, ...) to see how to
          better integrate PyKota with these.
          
        - Add most configuration directives to the database itself,
          while still allowing to overwrite them with the configuration
          files at run time.
        
        - Price and statistics per page format.
        
        - Allow the admin to choose an action to take when the database
          is unavailable (server is down or something like that), so
          introduce two directives :
          
            nodb: accept|reject|hold
            lognodb: /path/to/file/for/later/batch/update/of/database
        
        - CUPS accepts the "STATE: ..." message as backchannel
          data : use this to tell CUPS what action has been taken
          for current job. I did some testing but wasn't able to
          make it work...
          
        - Documentation...
          
        - Learn more bits of PHP to help with phpPyKotaAdmin, which
          is a GREAT tool !
       
        - Multidatabase support, e.g. store users in LDAP, quota  
          related datas in PostgreSQL, history in text file,
          and so on... For 2.0, probably not before.
          
        - Re-add support for LPRng if interest is high enough (it is
          not for now)
        
        
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Please e-mail bugs to: alet@librelogiciel.com (Jerome Alet)