[sane-devel] Highlevel USB/FireWire bsd/linux/atheos scanner driver getgo & best practices.

[Steve Nordquist]

Preprelyude:
It was the shortest topic I could think of that didn't rhyme with
	Me have Scanmaker 6700!
	You make Inspiron 2650 (Intel chipset) boot FreeBSD to use it,
	Me smile then (Coal in tummy still not feel like diamond.)

(Thanking people profusely for writing and extensively debugging the Plustek and
Microtek X6 I had before might not work either; I'd go poor scanning doujinshi
or whatever.  Thanks anyways and let me know if I can send you a profusion.)

Preface:
I'm all hopped up on XnView (which uses 'plugins' that make G4 ports that much
harder) and decided to think about making ScanWizard 5 run in bsd.  (FreeBSD
being the only thing that seems to have USB drivers in SANE going for it.)

Stuff:
So naturally I'm missing a few more things than even the SANE FAQ mentions,
such as:
  a) Film ADF?  You're kiddingl all the prepress people I talked to
	said it's useless unless you have exactly one make and chemisty
	of film, all exposed alike.  But Microtek says their latest ADF
	can feed mounted film stock if you want....might need a bigger
	lamp area or something. there.
   d) Scanning tips?  It all seems to complicated now, but all threre is past a
	clean clear platen and appropriate lighting from the source of
	one's choice (Enhance lightbulbs, handy 110v CF bulbs at a good
	distance, anything with low UV) and platen cleaning fluids that
	don't fluorece much is that you log metadata in the image files
	when at all possible.  Datestamps, locale, photographer, etc.) 
  1)  kernel architecture of sane wrt userland/kernel/devfs on various OS,
	and hence how firewire/usb scanners would work on OpenBSD
	in theory.
  2)  middleware architecture available in same; what if I want to do a retake
	on the same scanner data with different driver parameters or go
	use pipefs on same, expecting the SANE client on the other end to
	cope?  Doable?  Userland?
  3)  Okay, so I sent to customer support at Microtek for the developer API.
	Perhaps there's a more relevant e-mail...?
  4)   Are there other open source scanner efforts of note?
  5)  Where's the feature wishlist, are tools more sophisticated than CVS
	(Rational, say) used in code designation, and is there a way
	to use WINE to acquire more drivers?  (I mean, I can use
	CygWin or User Mode Linux in WinXP, but how about folding
	that around with a provided  windows driver and praying
	the Crusoe CPU happens to refactor correctly?)
  6)  What does OS porting look like for projects like this now, (with 
	Plan9 and AtheOS in the testable wild) anyhow?  Is there a
	good knowledge authority online for that work (where people
	who got make config to work in Plan9 say so, etc.)