[sane-devel] Re: ISCAN 1.10.0 and Mandrakelinux Cooker

[Julien BLACHE]

Johannes Meixner <jsmeix@suse.de> wrote:

> According to Olaf (if I understand him correctly) the iscan
> frontend is the real problem. This would no longer work without
> the proprietary libs.

We -really- do not care about iscan, as it's very epkowa-centric and
would not really suit another backend very well.

> Perhaps the proprietary libs could be replaced by free dummy
> libs which provide the same function calls so that the frontend
> has something to call but the dummy functions result only an error
> code which is defined in the frontend so that the frontend doesn't
> crash but show an error message to the user.

AFAIR, the binary libs for the frontend implement some image
manipulation routines, so nothing really critical for the iscan
frontend (although IIRC it counts for a great part of iscan's
features).

For the backend, it's a bit more problematic. You can't simply put
dummy libs and return an error code; you need to disable the affected
scanners and error out if you need to load the said libraries. (you
could do that dynamically, ie check for the existence of the libraries
at runtime, so the user would get a chance to grab the libs if he
really needs them)

Using the backend without the binary libs isn't that hard, it would
only take a couple of hours to make sure everything works fine.

Using the frontend without the binary libs isn't that easy, and it
isn't terribly useful either.

JB.

-- 
Julien BLACHE                                   <http://www.jblache.org> 
<jb@jblache.org>                                  GPG KeyID 0xF5D65169