[sane-devel] Questions from new backend developers

[Simon Krix]

Hello,

Our Canon parallel scanner project has recently finished (almost)
our SANE backend. 

We've got a couple of things to ask the list about issues of
policy -

a) The scanner needs to be recalibrated every now and then (which
entails storing an 80k file somewhere). Where should the file be
saved? 

b) The driver is linked against libieee1284. This is a linux-only
library at the moment. Is there a requirement that all backends
must compile on all architechtures?

On an aside, I noticed there have been a few questions about
running parallel scanners non-root today. Has anyone got any ideas
about this? Since I use libieee1284, my backend runs perfectly as
a user. Tim Waugh, the author of libieee1284, responded on this
list in June:

> In the future it would be nice if SANE could use libieee1284 for
> the parallel port devices.  Then all the smarts for how
different OSes
> do parallel port access end up in one place.
> (If you'd like to help me add OS/2 support to libieee1284, pleae
> contact me in private mail.)

He has a good point. SANE could really benefit from this kind of
centralisation. It would also make it easier to support new
scanners (I wouldn't have had to write my own implementation of
IEEE 1284 nibble mode if I had known about it) and allow
everything to be run as non-root on architechtures which support
that. What does anyone else think? 

Simon Krix (http://canon-fb330p.sourceforge.net/)

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