[sane-devel] SANE V2

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 01:19:31PM +1100, Matthew Duggan wrote:
> > 4.3.16 sane_verbose_error
> >
> > This function returns a verbose description of the latest error. The
> > returned string consists of one or more complete sentences. It is the
> > responsibility of the frontend to break the string into
> > managable-length lines. Newline characters in this string should be
> > interpreted as paragraph breaks. The function is guaranteed to never
> > return NULL. The returned pointer is valid at least until the next
> > call to this function is performed.
> >
> > SANE_String_Const sane_verbose_error(Sane_Handle h)
> >

"This function provides a verbose description of the error code
returned by the latest call to a SANE function. The returned ...

The error description must be set to "" if the latest SANE function
did return SANE_STATUS_GOOD."

So the intention is: the message stays the same until any other
SANE function returns an non-error status code. Everything not
returning a status would be ignored.

The issue of thread-safety was raised. I've never used threads and I
also don't know if thread-safety is necessary for this function but if
the following declarion avoids trouble, it's ok, too:

void
sane_verbose_error(Sane_Handle h, SANE_String *description, SANE_Int max_len);


I'm not exactly happy with this function. Mostly because it doesn't
provide the error at the point when the error occurs but sometime later.

A little brainstorming:

What about using the proposed message call-back instead of this
function?

So the backend would call the callback immediatly, when a fatal error
occurs. Fatal means, that it will return anything other than
SANE_STATUS_GOOD. This would work for command-line programs but may be
messy for graphical frontends.

E.g. sane_open ("/dev/scanner") is called, the open system call fails,
because of "file not found" and the abyckend calls the message
callback with this error message. The callback returns immediately and
the backend returns SANE_STATUS_INVAL. Now the frontend would pop up
another error message about the STATUS_INVAL. Quite chaotic.

Another way would be to extend the SANE_Status values. E.g. the top 16
bits are for backend-local error. So both the standard SANE error code
and something that has more information could be stored.
sane_strstatus could be used to print it.

However, if you want to use messages like "can't open /dev/something"
that means dynamic numbering. Not too nice, also.

Bye,
  Henning