[sane-devel] incompatible iscan-2.11.0

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Johannes Meixner <jsmeix at suse.de> writes:

> On Apr 23 17:04 m. allan noah wrote (shortened):
>> On 4/23/08, Julien BLACHE <jb at jblache.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > Well, without the non-free bits it provides better support for some
>> >  scanner, and supports devices no other backend supports :)
>> 
>> which scanners are those? I wonder if the best course of action would
>> be to update the epson or epson2 backends to support those scanners,
>> then you could drop epkowa.
>
> Use something like
>
> egrep ':model|:comment' doc/descriptions-external/epkowa.desc \
>  | grep -B1 ':comment.*non-free'
>
> and you get entries like
> [snip]

Johannes and I discussed the format of the comment entries after he
started using what I had started adding on a voluntary basis.  I was
happy to know that the information was useful.

> Unfortunately most models which require a non-free plugin
> are not supported by another (i.e. free) backend.

Very sad, but true.  Me not happy.

> Furthermore many of the proprietary models require firmware upload
> which is automatically done by the epkowa backend together with
> the matching non-free plugin.

To be precise the upload is done by the plugin, not by the backend.  I
wish I had the time for extract the upload bit into a separate utility
that can be started from udev ...

> Currently - as far as I found out (see below) - firmware files
> are only needed for the following scanners:
> [snip]
>
> To determine for which models the firmware files are:
> For each firmware file do "strings $firmware-file | grep ^EPSON".
> At the moment this results the following models:
> esfw41.bin: GT-F500
> esfw32.bin: GT-9400
> esfw52.bin: GT-F520
> esfw43.bin: GT-F600
> esfw54.bin: GT-X750
> esfw66.bin: GT-S600
> esfw68.bin: GT-F700
> esfw7A.bin: GT-F670
> Then check epkowa.desc which other models require the same
> non-free plugin and assume that all those models require
> the respective firmware file too.
>
> By the way:
> I must know which models require firmware upload so that I can
> inform our users when they try out a free backend where the
> firmware upload must be configured manually.
> Again a nice example which awkward things I do to deal with
> Epson Avasys' proprietary stuff in particular because their
> official policy is to not help distributors to package their
> proprietary stuff well and easily.

Johannes, when did you ask?  I can add the firmware files to the
epkowa.desc file if you want but it would be nice if there were some
extra fields (or a mechanism for custom fields, something like the X-*
header with mail) where I could put them.  Adding everything to the
comment field gets a bit messy and kludgey.

As to the "official policy" bit, at least this developer here is not
aware of any such policy and wonders how you found out about it.
Griping about things you don't like is one thing, but (quite likely)
misrepresenting the state of affairs is another and it doesn't look
good on you.  Stick with the fact and let's see if something can be
worked out.

> Step by step Epson Avasys' official policy results what they
> actually ask for: "do not actually realase it but keep it under
> Epson Avasys' full control" - o.k. - they conviced me - they
> can get what they ask for...

About "official policy" I don't know, but I do know that you asked for
a couple of things in the past and got several of them.  The non-free
references in epkowa.desc is one of them, easy build support on
unsupported architectures is another.

Hope this helps,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen                   FLOSS Engineer -- AVASYS Corporation
FSF Associate Member #1962           sign up at http://member.fsf.org/