[sane-devel] GUI for sane configuration

[Christian Fughe]

Hi,

On Wed, 17 Apr 2002, Henning Meier-Geinitz wrote:

> Examples? Do you mean something like
> `./configure --net-hosts="some.server.domain"'?

Yes!

> In my opinion, we shouldn't mix installation and run-time
> configuration. After runnning ./configure ; make ; make install; SANE
> runs, that means e.g. scanimage calls all the SANE backends.

I agree, installation and run-time configuration should not mixed! From
some minutes of reflection I return with the following questions.

Which feature of the backend needs to be configured at run-time and must
not be operative after 'make install', even if the user knows he wants
this feature? Which options do need run-time configuration and are not
related to scanner and OS detection? Most things run out of the box.

Me, I do not miss a GUI. ...May Be The Following Is In The Wrong Thread...
But, as far as I know, there are two parts in sane, which are by
definition not operative after 'make install' and for which post-install
configuration is mandatory. It is the net-backend and saned. Every thing
else is setup to work out of the box and that is great!


My suggestions:

1.) After several successful years of sane it is up to the time ( Die Zeit
    is reif :-) ) to make sane an official member of /etc/services and
    /etc/inetd.conf. I use SuSE 7.1. Perhaps this suggestion became
    already standard for other distributions. Maybe, the SuSE setup tool
    does not support saned, because saned is not an official member (man
    saned) of these /etc/* files. Maybe, an authorized sane-member should
    ask SuSE to add support for saned. They do advertise with sane scanner
    support.

2.) Give the net-backend and saned a chance to be operative after 'make
    install'.

3.) No GUI, but continue autodetection.

> The idea of SANE is that you don't need to call ./configure again when
> you install a different device.
>
> That's why we always install all drivers and don't have
> "--with-backends=mustek" in configure.

I agree with you and do not think in this direction. Today sane can do
better.

> I think it's up to the distribution maintainers to provide a GUI or
> script that asks you questions about your configuration. They know
> their configuration (operating system, device files, libraries,
> permissions), we don't.
>
> It's up to the SANE people to make configuration as easy as possible:
>
> * auto-configuration where possible; this works for most SCSI and
>   USB scanners on Linux
> * providing good defaults and easy configuration for other systems
>   (e.g. setting a symlink instead of editing 3 files)
> * providing good documentation
> * expressive error messages if something goes wrong ("permission
>   problem while accessing /dev/sg1" instead of "invalid argument"

I completely agree!


Again, thank you all for this powerful pice of software,

Christian Fughe <c.m.fughe@wtb.tue.nl>