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

[David Zeuthen]

On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 17:52 +0100, Julien BLACHE wrote:
> I know, but I doubt it supports OS/2 or BeOS :)

Probably never... but never say never I guess :-)

> > I'll try writing the patch today but I just need a scanner where the
> > libsane driver supports buttons. Any recommendations for a cheap scanner
> > I should get?
> 
> I think there are daemons for (some of) the avision and fujitsu
> scanners, though you'll need to double-check that.
> 
> And as m. allan noah wrote already, there is nothing standardized in
> SANE as far as the buttons are concerned. You're going after some very
> experimental stuff that will change with SANE 2 :)

Oh, that's fine. If the patch gets accepted I would do my bit along with
others to help maintain the code and carry it forward... the interface
I'm aiming for in HAL should be able to cope with the implementation
changing; all it would is to emit a ButtonPressed(string buttonType)
signal where buttonType would be a well defined string.

I'm planning just basing this on the existing sanebuttonsd code; that
looks pretty generic.. or am I missing something?

> Also, handling more than one scanner could be complicated, depending
> on what you want to do, how you want to do it, and what is already
> done in the backend.

Plan is to invoke an instance of the addon per connected device and each
instance of the addon would just use libsane to connect to the given
device (HAL gives the address of the device). 

I suppose that would work well if, and only if, libsane can drive
multiple devices at the same time... which it looks like when looking at
the code, yes? In many ways the addon is just another application of
libsane much like xscan etc.

     David