[sane-devel] scanimage problem / sane 1.0.8 / Epson / Solaris 8 (x86)

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 04:12:52PM +0100, Ed Randall wrote:
> One thing that was immediately apparent by setting 
> SANE_DEBUG_SANEI_SCSI=255 was that it was looking for devices other
> than my Epson scanner,

That's expected behaviour. If you also enable SANE_DEBUG_DLL=255, you
can see which backend is currently active.

> the first it tried was /dev/camera...

That should be ok. It's used by the dmc backend as a link to the
actual SCSI camera. Is this file used for anything else on Solaris?

> a
> bit more investigation led me to edit dll.conf and comment out
> all those extra devices that are enabled by default.

That's usually a good idea to avoid running into bugs of other
backends. Currently I don't know of such a bug, however.

> This didn't fix the problem(s) though, in to the bargain I started 
> getting very frequent SIGSEGV's.

Removing backends from dll.conf resulted in segfaults? That's
interesting :-)

> I made some debugging code changes to epson.c (see "diff -c" patch
> output below) to debug data buffers in a controlled-length hex dump 
> instead of 1 byte per line.  There was some code already there to 
> do that true, but 
> (a) it didn't do it exactly the way I needed, and was slightly
> complicated, I couldn't see immediately exactly what it was doing, and
> (b) it needed to be in a function so I could use it from a couple
> of places.  You could hopefully move it out into a more general
> file and use it elsewhere now.

Yes, maybe similar can be added to the sanei_debug stuff. However, be
careful not to use printf/fprintf directly because you never know, if
you are on a network connection (running saned).

> I think there's a lot of non-intrusive interaction going on between 
> the various backends that are enabled by default, the initial default
> installation maybe needs to be a bit more careful on the settings for
> the sake of naive lazy users who just want to scan and not be 
> software configuration experts ;-)

Generally, all SCSI backends send a SCSI inquiry command to the
devices they check. That's either /dev/scanner or any device manually
configured. This shouln't harm any device. And the advantage is, you
don't need to be software configuration experts and only set one link
(/dev/scanner).

It would be even easier if there was a way to search for a specific
SCSI device on Solaris. Then the "scsi ..." directives in the config
files wouldn't only work on Linux (and BSD?) and the user wouldn't
even have to set the link.

If there is any problem with a backend's autodection on Solaris, feel
free to comment on it.

> A couple of side issues I encountered during installation - the
> sane-config script that gets installed is no longer compatible with
> the ./configure in xsane 0.86, lots of usage messages pop up.

Hm? This doesn't happen here (with Linux). Can you investigate, what's
the problem? As far as I know, sane-config.in hasn't been changed
significantly.

> Also it uses "echo -e $usage" in 
> lots of places, this may work on Linux/Bash but it is not portable /bin/sh 
> behaviour for the Solaris nor the rest of the Unix world ;-)

That's probably true. I'm not quite sure why this hasn't occured when
I testest *BSD, Solaris, AIX etc. Maybe I never tried the usage output.

> Anybody who has tried installing gtk, glib and sane in a non-standard
> place (ie not /usr/local/bin) as I have will probably agree with me that
> the ./configure process for dependant applications has now become much harder.

You mean "since the XXX-config scripts exist"? That's wuite a long
time :-)

> Whilst the XXX-config script is intended to report back locations of critical
> parts, the ./configure seems unable to do the right thing - it can't find the
> XXX-config script unless I put it on the path (DESPITE having a separate
> --with-XXX=path-to-XXX-config option TELLING it exactly where to look) and
> even then I find myself having to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH, LDFLAGS, CFLAGS and 
> CPPFLAGS variables to help it along - this shouldn't be necessary.

Maybe it's easier to set GTK_CONFIG to the path to gtk-config? That's
the only thing I ever did to get xscanimage working on some non-linux
platforms. An why don't put the XXX-config file into the path?

> Perhaps Linux people don't have this trouble - but if all the world is to run 
> Linux, why bother with ./configure ? :-)))

Even Linux is different :-). E.g. not every library is everywhere. But
SANE is definitely not Linux-only, I test at least compilation with
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Irix and AIX. However, most of
these systems don't have scanners and some don't have gtk and/or gimp
so testing isn't complete.

> Do you need contributors? 

Absolutely!

> When I get more time maybe I'll take a look
> at joining in and trying to help fix some of these issues.

That appreciated very much.

Bye,
  henning