[sane-devel] [RFC] Improving sane-find-scanner

[m. allan noah]

On Sun, 27 Aug 2006, Julien BLACHE wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've got a patch (part of which I erroneously committed to CVS some
> time ago...) that makes sane-find-scanner tell the user which backends
> can be used with the USB scanners that it just detected.
>
> It's based on a table generated by sane-desc from the description
> files (really, 2 tables, one for backends included in sane-backends,
> and the other for external backends when we have description files for
> them). The tables eat up some space, so the sane-find-scanner binary
> gets bigger with this patch.

my only concern there would be if the user sees the name of an external 
backend, and assumes it is already installed. also- what about the case 
where a backend is installed, but disabled in dll.conf?

>
> I'm looking for feedback on that idea; I know it's basically a good
> idea and it needed to be done, but the implementation is pretty
> static, which may not please everyone. Probably having a directory
> where external backends can drop a file would be better, so parsing
> the desc files from sane-find-scanner looks like a better idea (would
> just need to generate the tables at runtime from the desc files, which
> would only duplicate some code from sane-desc).
>

are the desc files currently installed anywhere? does it make more sense 
to roll them up into structs in a .so that we could load? that reduces the 
runtime processing, while allowing external backends to provide additional, 
smaller files...

though honestly, i am not all that sure of the benefit. i mean, if you run 
sane-find-scanner and see it, but scanimage -L does not, then the backend 
support is missing anyway?

allan

> Thoughts ?
>
> JB.
>
>

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