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

[Julien BLACHE]

"m. allan noah" <kitno455 at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

> and a second reply to your mail- i too would like to avoid the soname
> bump, but we must acknowledge that we are changing both the API and
> the ABI, even if only slightly, and creating a potential for

changing vs. extending. Changing is unsafe without a soname bump,
extending is, as long as you don't break the ABI (e.g. adding a member
to a struct is a no-no, adding a member to an enum is pretty much
OK if you don't change the values of the other members). Provided the
spec is well written enough, but SANE 1 is. Frontend bugs will need to
be fixed if they arise.

> seems to be the fastest way to extend sane, while still making the
> world aware, and not requiring us to modify lots of stale backends to
> the as-yet unfinished sane2 spec.

If converting a backend to SANE2 can be done in a week-end as Oliver
suggested, I can't see why we could not convert existing backends,
even if unmaintained.

We couldn't test them, which is a problem. To remedy that (sort of) we
can sort the backends by maintained/unmaintained status at the source
level (aka 2 distincts directories).

[Oh, as a side note, I'd love to have that as a runtime feature too,
being able to identify maintained/unmaintained/experimental/external/proprietary
backends]

So 1. we don't loose old backends, 2. anybody with the hardware can
test them, fix them as needed and report back.

Anyway we won't be able to roll out SANE2 overnight, and there will be
a lengthy beta phase. That could leave enough time to get some of the
older backends tested & fixed.


Now, there have been a number of discussions on this topic
already. Oliver has valid points, others have too. Every time this
discussion happens, it all goes back to the status quo.

Maybe this time we will be able to actually get something done,
otherwise I'm afraid SANE might be doomed as it would mean it's just
unable to evolve.

And that would really be sad.

JB.

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