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

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the late follow-up (I'm preparing for a talk at AsiaOSS and
a seminar I have to give in Singapore -- I won't be able to read mail
from Aug 31 - Sep 9).

I've summarised your concerns and forwarded them up the food chain.
>From there they should hopefully make it to the people at EPSON who
decide (and pay for) what kind of work EPSON KOWA does on iscan.

FWIW, personally I agree with most, if not all, of your opinions and
am, in my free time, working on patches for a few of them.  It's just
that I can't get time scheduled to incorporate them in our official
releases :-(

Julien BLACHE <jb@jblache.org> writes:

> 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
>

-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen                            EPSON KOWA Corporation, PF1
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