[sane-devel] HAL and scanners.

[Étienne Bersac]

Hi,

> extending sane_open just a bit to always
> support 'libusb:xxx:yyy' or '/dev/sgX' is not an API change, so could
> be implemented much sooner, and really only requires changes to the
> backends that dont already use those names, which is few.

Right. Considering that HAL currently support usb, scsi and ieee1394, it
makes sens to have a common scanner naming policy :

      * USB = "<backend>:libusb:<busnum>:<devnum>"
      * SCSI = "<backend>:<devfile>"
      * IEEE1394 = "<backend>:?"

I have no idea for IEEE1394, but it would be nice to provide also a well
known device name for IEEE1394.

With a well known naming policy, a HAL callout could just compute the
sane device name on plug and publish it as HAL device property.

Once we have a resonnable policy for well known device name, we could
list backend that needs to comply. I didn't find, but i'm not very
skilled at search in all sane backends.

Regards,
Étienne.