[sane-devel] SANE_CAP_ALWAYS_SETTABLE (was Re: Preparing for a sane-backends release)

[Johannes Meixner]

Hello,

On Aug 5 08:21 Olaf Meeuwissen wrote (excerpt):
> Johannes Meixner writes:
...
>> My re-add-SANE_CAP_ALWAYS_SETTABLE.patch re-adds SANE_CAP_ALWAYS_SETTABLE
>> to sane.h which was erroneously removed in sane-backends-1.0.20 so that
>> sane-frontends and xsane can no longer build, see
>> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=527675
>
> Hmm, SANE_CAP_ALWAYS_SETTABLE is not part of the SANE Standard.

And what should a Linux distributor do when other programs
(in this case sane-frontends and xsane) use something
against the SANE Standard?

A Linux distributor cannot just tell their users:
   "Hey, sorry, sane-frontends and xsane are dropped for now
    from our Linux distribution. They can no longer be built
    because they use something against the SANE Standard.
    Just use 'scanimage' as frontend for now."

Linux distributors cannot provide broken stuff to their users.

When things break Linux distributors must do something quickly
(usually the easiest way) to ensure the whole stuff still works.

Then a (possibly lengthy) process might start at various upstream
projects to clean it up until at some later time it works again.

Or such a process does not start because nobody notices that
actually things are broken because Linux distributors had
done some adaptions to keep it still working.

Later by chance someone might have a closer look again
at old adaptions/patches of the Linux distributors and
then finally things might get really solved.


>> I did not verify whether or not meanwhile all SANE frontends
>> also no longer use SANE_CAP_ALWAYS_SETTABLE so that it could
>> meanwhile be really removed in sane-backends.
>
> The sane-frontends have it in an #ifdef conditional (in src/gtkglue.c)
> that was added in 5e96223, apparently to switch to SANE 1.1 which never
> materialized.

I meant "all SANE frontends" - not only sane-frontends.
I.e. also xsane and whatever else there is nowadays, cf.
http://www.sane-project.org/sane-frontends.html

Since openSUSE 11.1 sane-frontends is no longer provided by us.
I do not maintain any SANE frontend packages in openSUSE.
I maintain only sane-backends and when that causes breakage
in other packages then I will get a bug report and then I must
"fix" (see above what this means) "my" sane-backends package
to make things work again in openSUSE.

I checked now xsane in openSUSE and its RPM changelog contains:
----------------------------------------------------------------
Mon Jul 27 18:06:04 CEST 2009 - dominique-obs at leuenberger.net

- Update to version 0.997:
   + removed SANE_CAP_ALWAYS_SETTABLE (not SANE1)
----------------------------------------------------------------
Accordingly xsane should have been fixed since a long time.

But I cannot tell about the other SANE frontends and
right now I do not have the spare time to check them all.

Should I now just remove my old patch to see what happens?

But I really do not like it when then I get blamed if something
does no longer work so that for me personally it would be better
to just keep that old patch.


Kind Regards
Johannes Meixner
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