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

[m. allan noah]

On 3/20/07, Étienne Bersac <bersace03 at laposte.net> wrote:
> Hi allan,
>
> > 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.
>
> You know i'm contributing to this list. The discussion on Gnome derived
> to SANE and thus, land here. Don't threat a Gnome devels complot ;P

just trying to make sure you guys were paying attention :)

>
> > 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.
>
> ACK. I really don't want to have "buttons monitor backends" and
> "acquisition backends". That's crazy to maintain. The HAL add-on will
> use SANE and provide two dbus method (e.g. Reclaim and Release) in order
> to transmit device ownership.
>
> > 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?
>
> Don't use HAL :).
>

so now every linux distro that enables HAL support in SANE, locks
their users out of the most commonly used frontend, just to get button
support?

i would rather see a more general, non-linux specific method of
handling buttons. how about a daemon that runs, gets the sane device
list in the normal way, and then monitors each of the found devices
for button presses as regular sane options.

when a press is found, and there is a configured event to run, it
sane_close() that device and fork/exec another frontend, passing it
the device name as an arg. when the child exits, the daemon could
regrab?

on linux, sane_get_devices and other such functions might have the
ability to use a more advanced device finding capability?

allan

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