[sane-devel] 1.0.25 is out, now what?

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Sorry for the belated response.

Johannes Meixner writes:

> Hello Olaf,
>
> first and foremost many thanks for all your
> "SANE Project Janitor" work.
>
> On Oct 19 22:20 Olaf Meeuwissen wrote (excerpt):
>>> ... unofficial ... goals for sane-backends-1.0.26.
>> Feedback and suggestions are welcome.
>
>
> Suggestion for an additional goal for sane-backends-1.0.26:
>
> - drop support for parallel port scanners

Low priority for 1.0.26 at best.  But your suggestion made me think of
something more important:

 - integrate distribution patches

I've updated the milestone[1] to reflect this.

 [1] https://gitlab.com/sane-project/backends/milestones/1

> My plan is to do this for sane-backends-1.0.25 for openSUSE Tumbleweed
> [...]

I'd like to hear about your experiences.

> RFC for an additional goal for sane-backends-1.0.26:
>
> - switch to group "lp" instead of "scanner"
>
> Currently SANE upstream creates udev rules with
> MODE="0664", GROUP="scanner".
>
> Hereby I ask for comments whether or not SANE upstream
> should switch to group "lp" instead of "scanner".

I think it best to leave this to the individual distributions to decide.
What can be done fairly easily, however, is to make it easier for them
to override/customize the DEVMODE, DEVOWNER and DEVGROUP values in
tools/sane-desc.c.

> [...]
> It is sufficiently secure and reasonable easy to use by default
> the same group "lp" for printers and scanners because both kind
> of devices usually require physical user access (to get the
> printed paper or to place a paper on the scanner) so that both
> kind of devices should usually require the same kind of security
> and for multifunction devices only one group can be set and
> then the "lp" group is the more reasonable default setting. 

Security is not the only issue at stake here.  Use of consumables
(i.e. paper and ink/toner) is another that may need to be more strictly
controlled for printers than scanners.

> I do not know how read/write access for USB scanners is done
> in other Linux distributions.

FYI, Debian has

  ENV{libsane_matched}=="yes", RUN+="/bin/setfacl -m g:scanner:rw $env{DEVNAME}"

in its udev rules file.

Hope this helps,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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