[sane-devel] sane runs in windows without cygwin

[Ilia Sotnikov]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 4:25 PM, m. allan noah <kitno455 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/1/13 Michael Cronenworth <mike at cchtml.com>:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I've had success in building sane with MinGW, MSYS, and libusb-win32-0.12.
>> During my initial work I was unable to find much of anything about such a
>> feat as most people settled for Cygwin.
>
> Excellent news!
>
>> Some caveats:
>> 1. I ripped out all backends except for "fujitsu" as this is the scanner I
>> have. The "fujitsu" code required no modifications to compile.
>
> Did you try any others, or start with only fujitsu?
>
>> 2. Signals, threading, and scsi are also obviously not available. I put
>> #ifdef 32 or #ifndef WIN32 around the problem areas.
>
> sane-fujitsu does not use signals or threading, so you made a good
> choice of backend :)
>
>> 3. I changed sleep() calls to usleep() calls or used the Windows method of
>> sleep.
>
> I only see usleep calls in sane, but there is alot of code...
>
>> 4. getpass() is used?!?
>
> By scanimage, yes. SANE includes a rudimentary form of authentication
> checking, in case a resource requires more security. I don't know of
> anything that uses it.
>
>> In retrospect:
>> 1. The rest of the backends seemed to need extensive rework as they use
>> signals and ioctl calls that do not translate at all.
>
> There are a few others that dont use threading or signals (canon_dr,
> cardscan, ...), it would be nice to see if those compile as well.
>
>> 2. Threading and scsi could be made available quite easily by adding Windows
>> equivalents.
>
> Well, we would need a windows expert to do it :)
>
>> 3. Platform independent sleep calls should be put in.
>> 4. Obsolete function! This should be replaced with similar functionality.
>
> Certainly these two are easy fixes.
>
>> I have a GTK+2 app that used sane in Linux and it works in Windows without
>> any modification to the app code. I scanned successfully and my program
>> rendered a beautiful PNG to the screen. It should be noted that in order for
>> the scanner to be detected, I had to install the Fujitsu TWAIN driver. I
>> guess libusb-win32 could not detect the device until the appropriate driver
>> was installed? Artefact of using Windows inside of VirtualBox?
>
> That is odd. I don't know how windows works in that regard. Makes me
> wonder if we could produce some sort of prog that would read the sane
> .desc files and build a .inf or something to tell windows to talk to
> the device?
>
>> If anyone is interested in the changes I've made, I'd be interested in
>> making them available.
>
> yes, very much interested. there has been some talk lately about
> updating the sane build system, it might be possible to coordinate
> with that effort, so that at least minimal win32 support is added to
> mainline sane.
>

Well, what about experimental/sane-backends-win32 sitting in CVS for
about 18 months? To be honest, we are using that version of SANE
backends (dll + net) in native Win32 form for more than 2 years. The
version comes even with Inno setup installer support ;) Anyone
interested?

Best regards,
-- 
 Ilia Sotnikov