[sane-devel] As instructed by /etc/udev/rules.d/libsane.rules

[Alesh Slovak]

m. allan noah wrote:
> agreed. I have just had the same discussion in the bug tracker with a
> user of the proprietary brother backend. I think it is time that these
> external drivers started providing their own proper installation,
> instead of relying on us.

Easy for you to say. In reality this is very difficult to do properly. I know, 
we've been trying to do this in epkowa for years. In an attempt to follow distro 
policy, epkowa generates its udev rules file from the libsane one it finds 
installed on the system. This has gotten us and our users burned several times.

We can't use a static rules file because each distro uses slightly different 
syntax. And even then, we can't keep up with all the changes distros themselves 
keep making to their udev rules files resulting in breakage nearly every time a 
new version of a distro is released. This happened again with this months round 
of distro updates.

I have been thinking about modifying SANE's udev rules generation script in some 
way to allow for adding new rules and trying somehow to convince distros to 
package that up so third parties could use it in their install scripts to safely 
add new rules, maybe to a "third party" rules file or something.

What do people think about this idea?

If I were to do the legwork on this, what would be the chances that something 
like this could make it into SANE? Getting distros to package the script is 
another issue and third parties to actually use it, yet another. I suppose at 
least one possible benefit to SANE would be that the number of users coming to 
you for support relating to this problem should be drastically reduced.

Another possibility might be to convince distros to ship the desc files and the 
udev rules generation script and have third parties add their desc files to a 
folder and trigger a regeneration of the rules.

Any thoughts, or is this going outside the scope of SANE?

Happy scanning,
-- 
Alesh Slovak                    Linux Team -- AVASYS Corporation
alesh.slovak at avasys.jp          http://avasys.jp