[sane-devel] SANE2 standard completion

[Julien BLACHE]

Étienne Bersac <bersace03 at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

>> I also quite like the "users don't want another daemon running"
>
> Personnaly, i don't care to have a cups for scanner. But people in
> distributions, dev in other pieces of the stacks and end-users tell so.

You're getting more and more funny as time passes. Let's have a look:
 - people in distributions: that would be me and friends of
   mine. Having a daemon running for scanner access doesn't bother
   me. Having a gazillion daemons running for the GNOME desktop
   doesn't bother the GNOME maintainers I know. Case closed.
 - end users: they don't know what a daemon is, to begin with. They
   hardly care, as long as it all works; if they do care, they're not
   end users any more. Case closed.
 - dev in other pieces of the stacks: that would be you, I guess?
   Hardly relevant, given what I consider to be your lack of expertise
   and experience with SANE. Case closed.

> Again, we should not impose a service but rather keep at least library
> (and the daemon along) in order to allow to bypass the service.

Maintaining SANE as a library has all the problems we know: API/ABI
stability is an absolute must, side effects are an issue, bugs take
all the stack down with them, in messy ways sometimes.

Moreover you totally misunderstood what I proposed if you think
libsane itself is going away as a result. libsane is not going away,
under any circumstances.

> I guess you are labeling me as one of those "desktop people". Desktop
> users and developers, distributors and backend developers are sick of
> conservative people always considering other people as invader.

Yeeeeesh.

Wanna talk about your "INTEGRATE HAL IN SANE NOW OR ELSE..." approach?

>> Everything is not a desktop, the desktop is only one use
>> case.
>
> Don't reduce desktop as window manager + xsane.

Don't put words in my mouth, eh?

>> And we DO care about it, thanks very much.
>
> Sorry, what does mean DO ?

So far it means GUI frontends, hotplug/udev integration, resource
manager (horrible SuSE thing, but hey, it helped), there's been
discussion about mDNS integration and now HAL.

>> Integrating WITH a desktop doesn't mean writing the whole stack FOR
>> the desktop.
>
> Where did you read such statment ???

"don't do that because HAL can already do this and that" ?

>> Now, please try to understand that.
>
> Please try to understand end-users.

I do understand them, far better than so-called desktop developers,
even.


As far as HAL goes, your input is appreciated as long as it is
relevant to the discussion.

I honestly don't understand why you're trying to drive the SANE
development your way. We are discussing options, and all those options
*will* include various improvements at various levels.

If you read my proposal, it talks about a D-Bus interface and HAL
integration explicitely. I did not mention mDNS, but that's trivial to
add.

Now tell me, how do you transparently share scanners from one box to
another without a daemon?

I've been for a couple of years now, I've done quite some work on
packaging SANE and helped as much as I could. In the meantime I've had
countless mail exchanges with users, most of them true end users. I've
worked with clients who have a real need for a better shared
scanner/networked environment.

Now I'm putting this all together, and the best solution I can imagine
is what I proposed. I really think the current architecture doesn't
fit the current needs. SANE2 doesn't quite cut it either.

I think it makes sense. A couple of other people do so too. All of
them do know SANE pretty well. Some of them at least earn or earned
part or all of their living working on SANE for customers.

So, honestly, tell me: who's best informed? Can't you trust us? If you
don't trust me, I assure you that you can trust Rene or Allan. They're
real, experienced backends developers, and they've gone through quite
some things with SANE.

Before you ask, this is not at all a case of "who wins". I think what
I propose makes sense. Others have other ideas and experiences, and in
the end we'll do the right thing, because we know what we're doing.

If you don't trust us and can't resist the urge to sidetrack the
discussion as you do, then, by all means, this is all free software:
roll your own.


Can we please get back to work?

JB.

-- 
Julien BLACHE                                   <http://www.jblache.org> 
<jb at jblache.org>                                  GPG KeyID 0xF5D65169