[sane-devel] making scanbd work OOTB in debian - question about supported backends

[Rolf Leggewie]

On 28.02.2015 16:27, Wilhelm wrote:
> Am 25.02.2015 um 07:06 schrieb Rolf Leggewie:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I am maintaining scanbd in Debian and found scanbd difficult to
>> configure with lots of possible pitfalls.  As much as possible I want to
>> make it easy and failproof for the ordinary users to install and use
>> scanbd OOTB.
>>
>> One of the things that broke things for me and that were hard to
>> troubleshoot (I wrote to this ML about it last year) is that the SANE
>> backend configurations need to be present both in /etc/sane.d and
>> /etc/scanbd.  This is due to the nature scanbd sits on top of SANE. I
>> still wonder if scanbd couldn't be made to have an explicit
>> SANE_BACKEND_CONFIG_DIR in addition to the SANE_CONFIG_DIR?!  That would
>> eliminate the need for what I am about to explain.
> 
> What should be the effect of this env-variable SANE_BACKEND_CONFIG_DIR?
> 
> I think it would be best, if the SANE lib would support setting
> explicitly the config file (dll.conf) and / or the config dir.
> 
> Then saned could use this and introduced a -c <config-file> and / or
> -d<dir> options. And in turn scanbd can make use of this.

I thought I had already replied to this message but I cannot see it in
the archive.  My apologies if this comes out as a double-post.

As maintainer, I currently need to copy all backend files from
/etc/sane.d/*.conf to /etc/scanbd.  That is messy to say the least.  If
SANE_BACKEND_CONFIG_DIR was a variable separate from SANE_CONFIG_DIR
that wouldn't be necessary with obvious benefits to everyone.

I do believe that your suggestion of saned having a -d or -c parameter
would likely achieve the same result, alas, we don't have it and it's
not clear it will arrive.