[sane-devel] Proposal: Change of the backend and model status strings

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

There has been some criticism of the current handling of the :status
keywords in the .desc files. These filse are used to create our lists
of scanners and the output of the scanner search engine.

We currently have two sorts of status indicators:

1) The backend status: alpha, beta or stable
2) The model status: unsupported, untested, alpha, beta or stable


Concerning the backends status I think we don't really have the need
to talk about stability. Crashing backends are rather seldom. So I'm
not sure if we need this overall status at all anymore. If we want to
keep it, what about a measurement on how active the backend is
maintained, e.g.:

unmaintained: There is no maintainer. Only security and other
              grave bugs will be fixed
supported:    There is a maintainer for the backend. Bugs will be fixed and
              patches will be accepted.
development:  The backend is under active development. New features
              and/or new models may be added.

Model status: As proposed by others, I'd like to have a measurement on
how good a scanner works compared to its capabilities. E.g.:

unsupported:    This device is not working at all.
untested:       The device may work, but nobody has tested it yet.
minimal:        The device is detected and does something but is not
                really usable. E.g. It scans in one mode but colors
		are off.
basic:          The device is usable, but some modes are not supported
                or quality is not perfect yet.
good:           Usable for day-to-day work. Some unusual modes or
                seldomly-used features aren't supported.
perfect:        Everything the scanner can do is supported.		


Here is an example on how the HTML lists could look like:

http://www.meier-geinitz.de/sane/tmp/sane-mfgs.html#MUSTEK

Only the model status is implemented. And only Mustek SCSi scanners
have set the values.

Comments?

Bye,
  Henning