[sane-devel] Epson 4490 in Debian

[Julien BLACHE]

Johannes Meixner <jsmeix at suse.de> wrote:

Hi,

>> What I have done
>> now is suggesting to the upstream developers to make two packages, one
>> with the frontend and one with the backend, to be more distro-friendly.
>> I have no answer yet, lets see what they say.
>
> Be prepared to be very patient - I asked this since 14 Jul 2004,
> see the shortened mail at the bottom :-(

And the answer will probably be "it would confuse our users even
more", but then, so does using japanese model names all over the
place. I'm a bit fed up with trying to remember which japanese model
name matches which non-japanese model name :/

(It's painful enough with all those rebranded scanners, so if
manufacturers like Epson could stick to having only one model name...)

> I like to emphasize that it is not Olaf Meeuwissen who is to blame
> that there is almost no progress here.

Indeed, Olaf does as much as humanly possible to improve the
situation, but even sending patches to him doesn't help as he doesn't
have the time to merge them due to tight deadlines and schedule (he's
sending patches to himself to queue them until management allocates a
time frame to merge them in, IIRC).

And management is, well, management, aggravated by the fact that this
is a japanese company, the development is split between two entities
and includes IP from some other entities, with horrible communication
between the parties involved.

Basically, this is the situation as I get it, correct me if I'm wrong :)

> Perhaps it helps the Epson Avasys decision makers to make the right
> decisions when all (or at least almost all) Linux distributors
> demand the same thing.

It'd be nice if something could be organised between Epson's
management, SANE developers (Henning ? khk ? Oliver Schwartz ?) and
some key distributions to discuss the situation and see what can be
done to improve it as much as possible. (obviously I'd have no problem
attending such a meeting, as long as I am available on that day and
can make it to the meeting).

JB.

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