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

[m. allan noah]

On 12/21/07, Julien BLACHE <jb at jblache.org> wrote:
> "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.

ok, i guess i can go along with that logic.

> > 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.

SANE2 has not been touched in years, and the folks that are now around
to actually implement it, are not the ones that wrote it. You can bet
we will have to re-examine every change in the current draft before
anyone writes any code. hence, my desire to do something small that we
can agree on.

> 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.

it might only be a small step, but this time, we ARE going to move.

allan

-- 
"The truth is an offense, but not a sin"