[sane-devel] LSB DDK: Support for scanner drivers/SANE into LSB 3.2?

[Till Kamppeter]

Hi,

one important point which prevented from packaging HP's HPLIP was that 
it contains a SANE driver for the scanners in HP's multi-function 
devices and SANE is neither in the LSB nor in the LSB DDK. Also other 
printer manufacturers, like Epson or Brother could run into this problem.

I succeeded now to build SANE (sane-backends) with dynamically linked 
drivers in the LSB 3.1 Build Environment chroot. This SANE version does 
not work with parallel port scanners (some standard hardware IO 
functions needed by libieee1284 not in LSB) and it is not able to ask 
the user for a password ("getpass()" not in the LSB), but it provides 
the full SANE API for building scanner drivers.

To test whether scanner drivers built with this SANE version will work 
in real distros I have simply replaced some drivers of my normal system 
(Ubuntu Gutsy) by drivers from my LSB SANE package and they work also 
under Gutsy's SANE. Note also that Gutsy comes with SANE 1.0.18 and my 
package is a subversion snapshot of SANE near 1.0.19.

So everything seems SANE now to make distribution-independent packages 
of scanner drivers. And this will not only help for being able to 
include the scanner drivers for multi-function devices in the 
distribution-independent printer driver packages, it will also allow the 
creation of distribution-independent driver packages for stand-alone 
scanners and so we expand the LSB DDK also to scanners.

Therefore I suggest also to take SANE into the LSB 3.2. SANE comes with 
every distro, and its ABI (including the dynamic linking of the drivers) 
is really stable (SANE 1.0.x series). Manufacturers like for example 
Brother (I am not sure, perhaps Samsung too) provide binary-only SANE 
drivers which easily plug into all current distros. SANE in the LSB 
would also allow LSB applications to have access to scanners. Apps like 
OpenOffice.org could be LSB-packaged with full functionality then.

SANE developers, WDYT about SANE getting into the LSB? Are you willing 
to provide API documentation and testing procedures?

    Till