[sane-devel] Why does xsane-gimp exist ?

[John Vickers]

Henning Meier-Geinitz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 04:58:55PM +0000, John Vickers wrote:
> 
>>According to: http://www.xsane.org/doc/sane-xsane-gimp-doc.html
>>xsane can be used directly as a gimp plugin.  So what is xsane-gimp for ?
>>(I guess some kind of bug workarround).
> 
> 
> There is no xsane-gimp source package. xsane source detects if the
> gimp libraries are installed and enables gimp support in this case. So
> there is only one source code.
> 
> The distributors usually create two or more binary packages because
> otherwise you'd need to install gimp as a dependency of xsane. As gimp
> is a rather big package, this may not make sense for everyone. So
> there is one package with and one without gimp support.

Ah.  The explanation makes sense.  Thankyou.

I tried using /xsane/ (from the mdk 9.0 xsane rpm)
as a gimp plugin, but xsane died in a fraction of a second.  Of course /xsane-gimp/,
from the xsane-gimp rpm worked fine.

[I guess this is getting OT - it's a distro issue, not really a SANE issue]

But while the explanation makes sense, I'm not sure that the dual rpms make sense,
since the only extra requirement for gimp support seems to be the libgimp rpm,
and libgimp is a lot smaller than xsane-gimp.

The xsane-gimp rpm depends on the xsane rpm (for documentation, icons, localisation, etc).
  So if you have xsane-gimp, you end up with a redundant xsane binary

For my money, I'd just depend on libgimp anyway.   Or have conflicting xsane-gimp & xsane-nogimp
rpms.  I guess xsane could be hacked to handle the gimp dll manually too.

Regards,

John.