[sane-devel] How to release our SANE driver?

[Jan Kandziora]

Am Montag, 9. April 2007 10:30 schrieb Horky Chen:
> Dear all,
>
> We wrote a SANE driver for our own scanners, how shall we release it?
> I think we just need to copy .la and .so file into /usr/loca/lib/sane,
> and modify some configuration file. Our SANE driver  will be
> commercial package,  so could you please give me some comments?
>
The best idea ist *not* to give away packages with the hardware or via 
download on your company home page. This is "the windows way", and it's an 
incredibly clumsy way to distribution device drivers.

Linux users are happiest with drivers already included in their Linux 
distribution (CD/DVD and/or the distribution's package repositories). That 
way, drivers don't have to modify any configuration files but fit seemless 
into the distribution.

Therefore, the best way to distribute a propietary driver is to ask common 
distributors (e.g. Debian, RedHat, SuSE, Mandriva) to incorporate such a 
binary-only driver into their distributions. There are special repositories 
for such software, you won't be the first company doing it that way.

Kind regards

	Jan
-- 
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	The result of shutting down a production line.