[sane-devel] Canon LiDE 20 vertical lines

[Julien BLACHE]

Monty <xiphmont at xiph.org> wrote:

> I'm sorry, I should be fair here: It's not clear that this isn't a
> packaging or versioning problem in Debian.  However, both the .14 and
> .15 releases are broken here (in different ways).

You know, we have a fair number of users. When a scanner, especially a
recent one like the LiDE 20 breaks, we get a bug report in under a
week.

> Yes, but--- I'll bet real money that Debian's .14 is not a clean .14.

1.0.14 didn't contain a lot of patches. Most of the patches were not
affecting backends.

1.0.15 had a couple of patches for different backends, mainly because
1.0.16 took so long to release. There indeed was a patch for the
plustek backend in 1.0.15; I pulled the backend from CVS after Gerhard
made some fixes for the Epson Perfection 1260.

See for yourself:
<http://svn.technologeek.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/SANE/sane-backends/tags/?root=debian>

Look in debian/patches for each tagged release.


I don't like the accusations you're making. This is not $RANDOM_DISTRO
here with $RANDOM_MAINTAINER applying $RANDOM_PATCHES.

I've been maintaining SANE in Debian together with Aurélien Jarno for
more than 2 years now. We are reading sane-devel on a daily basis at
least, and hang out on #sane permanently. Whenever something happens,
we're here to help.

Whenever an important patch or new functionality pops up in the CVS, I
mark the commit mail and wait a few days to see how things go. If
things go well, I pull the backend from CVS. (I tend to be the one
pulling new functionalities into the package) When this happens, this
backend is on my radar and I track each and every CVS commit affecting
it.

When we have fixes or get a bug report, we react immediately and
propagate it to either this mailing-list or the CVS ASAP.


I spent some time assembling the sane-backends-extras source package
to collect as many (mostly) stable external backends as possible. It's
intended for use outside of Debian too, and I know it's being
used. The result of that is that the hp4200 backend is back from the
dead and just made it to the CVS.

Our goal is to provide to our users the best scanning experience they
could possibly have. And judging by the feedback we receive, we're
doing a great job. Today, scanning on Debian with any recent scanner
works *out of the box* for all USB scanners (of course not the ones
requiring a firmware, but that's trivial); PP scanners tend to work
great too, SCSI scanners are, well, SCSI scanners with all the
associated troubles.


Want more ? Aurélien took over the maintenance of libusb in
Debian, only because it is used by SANE and we wanted to have as much
control as possible over our dependencies, especially the critical
ones. And it proved to be a good idea.


So now, next time you'll have a problem with our packages, you'll
learn to either mail us or use reportbug in due time.

Until then, shut up. And I mean it. If you had quality problems with
1.0.14 or 1.0.15 Debian packages, you should have reported that back
then.

Go look at the state of SANE in other distros. Two years ago, I took a
look at the SANE packages of every single distro out of there, looking
for useful patches to integrate. The result ? Nothing. All I saw was a
dirty, unmaintained pile of hacks, badly written RPM specfiles, buggy
scripts, dangerous patches.

Sadly, this situation hasn't evolved much.

JB.

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