[sane-devel] SANE frozen in amber ?

[m. allan noah]

On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 8:42 AM, stef<stef.dev at free.fr> wrote:
> Le vendredi 12 juin 2009 19:52:57 m. allan noah, vous avez écrit :
>> On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Richard
>>
>> Ryniker<ryniker at ryniker.ods.org> wrote:
>> >> a frontend that asks for new, unsupported features, will simply
>> >> get an appropriate error code.
>> >
>> > Allen Noah, earlier in this thread (Thu Jun 11 19:08:28 UTC 2009) alluded
>> >
>> > to the problem with this approach when he wrote:
>> >>bah- then no front-end will use it, since it is not guaranteed to be
>> >>there.
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> > I believe SANE, like many other applications, will find it better to
>> > change its API in infrequent, discrete steps than to follow a "continuous
>> > change is permitted" strategy.
>>
>> Well, you can't get much more infrequent API changes than SANE :)
>>
>> Seriously, we have to bump the major number on the soversion to do any
>> changes. The only real question is what do we do with all the
>> unmaintained backends?
>>
>> 1: drag them along via modification
>> 2: leave them behind and make the frontends link against sane1 and sane2
>> 3: leave them behind and use a sane-compat meta-backend to make them
>> appear to have the sane2 api
>> 4: make our API modifications small enough that old backends will be
>> forward compatible
>>
>> Note that all 4 of these options are easier for the programmer if the
>> API changes are kept small. Are there any other choices?
>>
>> allan
>
>        Hello,
>
>        maybe deciding first on what features we want to bring in would help us to
> choose. Once we know what to add, it should be easier to plan how to do it.

We already tried that. It is called the sane 2 draft spec, and its
been sitting on the server for years. IMHO, we should not start
another round of open-ended dreaming. We must keep in mind what is
possible, given our limited resources. That is why I started from the
'how' instead of 'what' perspective.

allan
-- 
"The truth is an offense, but not a sin"