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

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Fri, Feb 07, 2003 at 01:05:25PM +0100, Julien BLACHE wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> As you know, I dropped the xsane-gimp1.2 package in Debian and built
> the xsane package with GIMP support.
> 
> As a sort of workaround to this, wouldn't it be possible to dlopen()
> the libgimp at startup, if run as a GIMP plugin ?

Probably yes. I haven't looked at the code but that means that you
have to wrap all the libgimp functions.

And you will get all sort of imcompatibilities with dynamic loadding,
see dll.c for examples. Well, at least if systems like aix and MacOS X
should be supported ;-)

I don't know if it's worth it.

Bye,
  Henning