[sane-devel] SANE2 commitment

[Martin Owens]

My point of view is that it is better to identify the problems you
wish to solve my creating a new version of sane that the current
version of sane can not be developed into.

The first problem I've noted with sane is that it is a little bit all
mixed up, detection mixed with scaning, paraport mixed with usb. not
good.

If you are going to start a new direction and really give it some
weight behind it I suggest the following:

For device detection and management use HAL, update hal dbus code with
all existing detection and status code which will keep these devices
happy, enable the modification of the hal xml as a simple way of
keeping track of which scanners work with which backends too, removing
this from the backend code is a must.

You can then change your clients to use hal and simply call dbus
commands to scan etc.

Paraport scanners need continued support, we don't just drop support
because something better has come a long. we should try to work with
the hal team and how their dealing with passive devices on para and
serial ports, we might be able to come up with something good that
allows the best combination of user selection and computer detection.

For the drivers them sevles, obviously use of libusb is good, but the
idea that libsane is a background package which doesn't offer anything
it's self is quite desirable. giving distributers the option of
installing some or all scanner backends. as long as device detection
etc is handled by hal then it won't even be a problem to have sane
request the right backend be installed upon use.

You can tell I've given this a lot of thought, sane was going to be my
next project to work on because I was sick to death of setting up
scanners with it.

On 12/17/06, Alessandro Zummo <azummo-lists at towertech.it> wrote:
> On Sun, 17 Dec 2006 20:25:01 +0100
> Frank Zago <sane at zago.net> wrote:
>
> > >  so you're saying to declare current sane as stable,
> > >  fork it and add features to the new tree, making
> > >  it "morphing" into something that will be the next sane?
> > >
> > Yes. I think sane1 can evolve into sane2 step by step so as to keep a
> > working  tree.
>
>  well, I'm open to this possibility. I just need to
>  add a new sane frame format after all :)
>
>
> --
>
>  Best regards,
>
>  Alessandro Zummo,
>   Tower Technologies - Turin, Italy
>
>   http://www.towertech.it
>
>
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