[sane-devel] SANE frozen in amber ?

[m. allan noah]

On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 3:40 PM, stef<stef.dev at free.fr> wrote:
> Le samedi 13 juin 2009 14:55:54 m. allan noah, vous avez écrit :
>> 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
>
>        OK,
>
>        but after a quick read, it seems to me that the draft doesn't address user
> notification during warming up, nor the case of sheet fed scanners
> calibration.
>

I think you missed my point. I did not say that the sane 2 draft was
good (in fact I disagree with quite a bit of it). Rather, I was saying
that standard started from the what-if perspective, rather than 'how'
and it was never built.

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