[sane-devel] Device recognition

[Julien BLACHE]

Olaf Meeuwissen <olaf.meeuwissen at avasys.jp> wrote:

Hi,

> If, however, you interpret the mapping as a scanner H/W interface to ID
> (and back) mapping, then of course your argument holds.  Or am I reading
> too much in your "<->" and incorrectly assumed a 1:1 mapping from that?

Yeah, the 1:1 mapping between IDs and model name is not possible for
obvious reasons, and we don't really care much about that anyway, but it
does map back to the hardware (there are exceptions though).

>> If we add this wildcard, we'll never complete this mapping, which I
>> think has some value in itself.
>
> The value of the mapping depends on the use case, IMHO.

Sure.

There's something else I haven't mentioned. Every time we get such a
report, we know there is someone somewhere using that hardware.

Given the shortage of manpower SANE is facing, it's valuable info too.

SANE has grown too big, backends have grown too complex and the API
... we've discussed it to death.

> In fact, a SCSI device with ATTRS{type} == "6" already is a kind of
> wildcard and no-one has any qualms about that being in libsane.rules.

It's true we've got that one already so another wildcard here won't
matter much. Oh well. I'll commit the change :)

> # Here's me wishing USB had a scanner class ... :-(

ISTR it was part of the USB spec at some point.

> The more scanners Just Work out-of-the-box the

What follows is by no means directed to you personally. Now, ...

Manufacturers want their scanner supported out of the box? Fine! Me too!

Open your specs. Write drivers. Don't put out crappy closed-source
drivers, be them SANE backends or TWAIN abominations.

For years, I've been trying to reach out to the problematic
manufacturers on occasion and so did others. Nothing came out of this
because they have their heads so far up their bottoms.

I'm truly fed up with that. I don't want to read any more rants from
manufacturers about this. It's past time for them to put up or shut up,
the rules about this have been laid out eons ago already.

Recently, I've been in touch with the TWAIN WG as they were looking at
integrating TWAIN into Linux distributions and got in touch with Debian
(among others, I guess).

I provided guidance, asked questions and pointed out a number of
potentially deadly technical issues. I'm still waiting for feedback on
that.

Seriously. We're all ready to help, but we do need some commitment from
the other side too.

JB.

-- 
Julien BLACHE                                   <http://www.jblache.org> 
<jb at jblache.org>                                  GPG KeyID 0xF5D65169