[sane-devel] Device description format changed in CVS (.desc files)

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

Yesterday I committed a new version of tools/sane-desc.c. That's the
program that generates our HTML lists of supported devices and is also
used for the scanner search engine.

The main change is that there is no longer a backend status, only a
per-device status. The possible status values have changed, I'll cite
doc/descriptions.txt here:

The keyword :status' is an indication of the level of support for the
model. It's followed by one of the following keyword arguments:
:unsupported', :untested', :minimal', :basic', :good', or :complete'.
The :status' keyword refers to the previous :model', is optional and
should be used only once per model. :unsupported' means the device is
not supported at least by this backend. The keyword should only be
used in the file unsupported.desc', or to make clear that a specific
scanner is not supported by a backend. :untested' means the device may
be supported but couldn't be tested. :minimal' means that the device
is detected and scans at least in one mode. But the quality is bad or
important features won't work. :basic' means it works at least in the
most important modes but quality is not perfect. :good' means the
device is usable for day-to-day work. Some rather exotic features may
be missing. :complete' means the backends supports everything the
device can do.  Example: :status :untested' 

sane-desc.c still accepts the old status codes (with warnings) and
tries to translate them: alpha->basic, beta->good, stable->complete.
This translation isn't correct in mayne cases, however.

So please update your description files as soon as possible to reflect
the actual support for the devices.

I'll update the unmaintained backends's description files.

Thanks to Jochen Eisinger for updateing the scanner search enigine to
the new format.

Bye,
  Henning