[sane-devel] The future of the SANE-Standard

[Julien BLACHE]

Oliver Rauch <Oliver.Rauch at Rauch-Domain.DE> wrote:

Hi,

> What is discussed in the moment is a "slow transformation from SANE1 to
> SANE2" (I don't remeber the exact words). And we do not discuss only
> some new frame types. It took about 30 minutes after this suggestion to
> add several other things that are not compatible to SANE1.

What's nice when you discuss things is that you end up not doing the
stupid things that came up during the discussion, and only keep the
most interesting ones.

Let's keep it at the frame types for now, that would allow for new
features and better support for some scanners, and some users may
really enjoy that. If we can do that, why not ?

> Now some people will say that we do not need all frontends to handle all
> frame types. But what is the adavantage of it when the frontends can not
> handle it. It only makes sense to add e.g.  a TIFFg3FAX or JPEG frame
> type when all frontends can handle this. But when we make this step,
> then we should make the complet step to SANE2.

As you've just written, not all the frontends need to handle all the
frame types. (and let's digress on frontends now)

What is important from a frontend point of view is the target audience
it's designed for. The one-size-fits-all is absolutely not the
solution for something as complex as a scanning frontend.

What we really need, err, what USERS really need, is a range of
frontends that match their needs as closely as possible:
 - one frontend for the average joe user to handle basic scanning
   needs (b/w text, documents, photos)
 - one frontend for the advanced user (would be today's XSane)
 - one frontend for the über-advanced imaging guru, with advanced
   features like IR, etc.

That's to give a rough idea of what I mean, it's a bit more complex
than that actually, but you get it.

As it stands today, users have a hard time finding a frontend that
suits their needs, precisely because there isn't any.

The average joe user doesn't grok how XSane works, xscanimage doesn't
cut it because it's too primitive. Something resembling Epson's iScan!
frontend is probably very close to what's needed. Gnome Scan might do
it, though, but I'm not convinced.

The advanced user is usually well served with XSane (integrated with
GIMP).

Anybody who wants something more advanced than XSane either goes for
VueScan, Windows or writes something, be it a script around scanimage
& stuff or hacks a tool or even a backend to suit his needs.

Just like SNMP needs to put some more S in it, SANE needs to put back
some E in SANE.


Because some frame types are added to SANE doesn't mean you have to
add support for them in XSane. Part of the job in maintaining a piece
of software is knowing where you want to go and when to say "sorry,
no" to a feature request.

JB.

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