[sane-devel] Sane is definately not Scanner Access Now Easy

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 02:05:18PM -0800, Art Fore wrote:
> Documentation for all of this is spread all over and some of it is flat out
> wrong, especially for these versions.

Please explain in detail which SANE documentation is wrong and which
one is at a wrong place. I promise I will fix it if I can and if you
are right.

> Of course SuSE does not help either.

Last time I checked there was quite some information in the support
database. Maybe it's outdated?

> There should be one place for some howtos on installing scanners to work
> with Xsane and Gimp.

Some information is here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ljm/SANE-faq.html

> I will try to reconstruct my steps and send in.

That would be nice.

> Every hardware installation takes anywhere from 4 days to two weeks.

No, at least not with SANE.

> Hopefully the Linux community and the hardware manufactures get their
> act together, otherwise, Linux will never be on the home desktop except for
> some linux gurus and a few technical people.

Sometimes I think it would be better to stay with only "a few
technical people" and say so. This way we wouldn't receive rants like
yours. BTW: "a few technical people" are the ones that actually create
the software you use.

Don't get me wrong: criticism is appreciated if you point to bugs in
code or documentation.

Maybe I got something wrong here but this is the story how I see it:

* You want to use a scanner made by a manufacturer who doesn't provide
  drivers for your operating system
* the standard drivers that (most likely) come with your os don't support your
  scanner (other operating systems don't even have scanner drivers
  shipped with them)
* someone wrote a driver for your scanner without beeing paid by you
  or the manufacturer of the scanner. He even lets you access his development
  tree before the release is done and before it's in your distribution's
  package system.
* you have quite a few questions about installation and running. Quite
  some of them could have been solved by looking at the documentation.
  Others result from compiling software on your own (and would have
  existed with any other package)
* About 10 people, quite some of them developers of the SANE system
  you use, try to help in several ways. These are not paid support
  people but the ones that actively use the code or even created it.
* Your scanner works now.

Probably tens or hundreds of hours have been spent to write a driver
*for you* (and others). Hours have been spent by people trying to help
*you*.

And despite of all this you are constantly complaining about SANE and
Linux.

I will never understand this.

Bye,
  Henning