[sane-devel] Re: [PATCH] generate hal fdi file

[m. allan noah]

On 3/20/07, Julien BLACHE <jb at jblache.org> wrote:
> David Zeuthen <david at fubar.dk> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> > So I'm curious if a) you think this is a good idea; and b) whether such
> > a patch would be able to go into mainline SANE? Thanks for considering!
>
> Looks good to me, as long as the added code in SANE is propery
> #ifdef'd out etc. Let's try not to turn SANE into a Linux-specific
> piece of code :)
>
> Also, how do you manage different HAL versions ? Is the HAL plugin API
> stable ?
>
> What would be the impact in terms of:
>  - added code
>  - added library dependencies (and here I'm especially worried about
>   bringing in the infamous GLib for the DBus stuff in dll.c, so if we
>   could avoid it, that'd be nice)
>

it would be nice if some of the linux gnome devels would engage in
SANE discussions on the SANE lists. they might learn something about
the hardware they are trying to support :) button handling comes up
here quite a bit, you should search the archives of the sane-devel and
sane-standard mailing lists.

it is clear that there is a growing desire to do something, but the
complexity of the problem, and the variety of scanners will make the
approach you outlined more difficult.

1. you need a piece of code that understands the button-reading
protocol for every scanner that sane supports. you will end up
replicating a fair bit of code that is already (hopefully) in
sane-backends, esp. for devices that require a bit of initialization
before they can communicate.

2. what happens when the user fires up scanimage command line tool
without pressing any buttons? how do we deal with the contention for
the device?

allan

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