[sane-devel] incompatible iscan-2.11.0

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Julien BLACHE <jb at jblache.org> writes:

> Johannes Meixner <jsmeix at suse.de> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
>> Perhaps it leads to the "solution" that the Linux distributors
>> agree to no longer distribute their proprietary stuff?
>
> That would be a good first step...
>
> That said, I have never distributed anything else beside the epkowa
> backend itself, so no changes on my side :)
>
> But now I have a real problem, that is there is a new iscan release,
> people know (or will know) about it and they're going to bug me to
> upgrade the backend. It's not possible to upgrade the backend without
> losing support for some scanners at least, and not upgrading means
> losing support for the other scanners, I guess.

Not saying this is an ideal solution, but you as the libsane-extras
package maintainer can upgrade.  Whether people will install the
upgraded or not is their choice.

Let's face it, the upgraded package is not going to go into stable
(etch).  It will make it into testing (lenny) and people running that
should know better than to upgrade without thinking.  If you add the
right conflicts to the package they should take note, one may assume.

I have added a long list of conflicts to our iscan RPM and (still
experimental) Debian packaging support so that people get notified
about the incompatibility.  I know it's a PITA to do the same to
libsane-extras, but without breaking backward compatibility (for a few
non-free plugins) there was just no way that I could add support for
independent X/Y resolutions that give access to resolutions over
3200dpi.  That was something people have been clamouring about several
times here wrt iscan.  You can't always and immediately have it both
ways.

> Can't imagine a better situation than this one...

I can, but just imagining it is not going to help anyone :-(
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen                   FLOSS Engineer -- AVASYS Corporation
FSF Associate Member #1962           sign up at http://member.fsf.org/