[sane-devel] sane-epkowa

Olaf Meeuwissen olaf.meeuwissen at avasys.jp
Tue Apr 7 07:24:16 UTC 2009


Johannes Meixner <jsmeix at suse.de> writes:

> On Mar 26 15:08 Alesh Slovak wrote (shortened):
>
>> It is the iscan frontend that does, unfortunately, require some binary
>> blobs and cannot be compiled for Mac OS X. It would still be possible,
>> however, to use the epkowa backend on Mac OS X with other SANE frontends.
>
> Yes, and I make our iscan-free package for openSUSE
> by manually removing all proprietary stuff which is
> unfortunately included in the source tarball of the software
> so that the whole source tarball is tainted by proprietary stuff.
>
> Additionally I have a few patches, e.g. a patch to adapt the man page
> (basically remove the models which require proprietary stuff).

The list of supported models was dropped from the backend's manual
page in 2.14.0.  The list is now installed in the package's ${docdir}.

FWIW, that list includes what plugins are required, if any, and is
generated straight from the NEWS file.

> Again and again I request here once more that Avasys
> provides well separated source tarballs
> - one which contains all the free sources
> - as many other ones as you like for your proprietary stuff

I do understand your concerns but there is very little chance that
they will be addressed.  There is very little concrete benefit to do
so from our point of view, at a very concrete overhead.

> Note that it is crucial to remove the proprietary stuff first of all
> from the sources because otherwise the proprietary sources would
> end up in our source RPM which may end up at our customers systems
> which may not be happy when whatever kind of non-free stuff
> is installed (even if it is "only" non-free sources).
> In particular those (usually business) customers who care very much
> regarding the licenses of all what is installed on their systems.

I will keep this in mind for a next incarnation, if there will ever be
such a thing.

Hope this helps,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2           FLOSS Engineer -- AVASYS Corporation
FSF Associate Member #1962               Help support software freedom
                 http://www.fsf.org/jf?referrer=1962



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