[sane-devel] Iscan and Ubuntu 17.10/18.04 fixed

Olaf Meeuwissen paddy-hack at member.fsf.org
Sun Nov 19 08:14:02 UTC 2017


Hi Klaus, Jörg,

staedtler-przyborski writes:

> [... Ubuntu using libsane1-1.0.27-1~experimental* packages breaks just
> about any third party SANE backend package ...]
> In the meanwhile we got the following backends working by doing these steps:
>
> 1. Brother: brscan, brscan2, brscan3
> 2. Epson Iscan
> 3. Xerox Workcentre 3225

I read through the bug report you mentioned below and think the whole
thing sucks.  Ubuntu has made a *huge* judgement error pulling an
*experimental* package for their upcoming release just to get a newer
version of the SANE backends upstream.  A lot of scanners supported by
third party scanner break for no good reason.

I think things can actually be solved quite easily if Jörg can upload a
libsane-1.0.27 package that simply uses the debian/* from 1.0.25 with a
few minor changes:

 - change the configure invocation to account for the changed USB option
   (see note 2 of the NEWS file)
 - drop any patches that we included (mentioned in an earlier head's up)
 - the usual "new version" changes

This can be uploaded to Debian's unstable/sid and Ubuntu can then pull
that for their upcoming release.

> Any help/advice appreciated.

See above.

@Jörg> You can stop reading here and start on that package ;-)

> The owner of the brscan4 Scanner asked Brother. They replied: "read the
> faq, or check over internet if there are solutions from the community".

That's a polite way of saying "We don't support GNU/Linux" :-(

Brother is not alone in this.  Manufacturers may publish a package that
makes the device work with (a subset of?) SANE but that is not the same
as providing support.

> current state can be observed here
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sane-backends/+bug/1728012

Ugh!

> Some people call using 'MODE="0777" for epson dangerous. The rule was
> installed by the epson-printer-utility. With the rule Iscan works,
> without not.

A mode of 0777 gives anyone on the PC/laptop access to the scanner (MFP
in your case, I believe).  Whether that is "dangerous" depends on who
uses th PC/laptop.  The idea behind 0664, used by many distributions,
and making the device owned by a special purpose group (scanner, lp,
etc.) or adding an ACL for that group is that that allows the machine's
admin to configure some kind of access policy.

I think that 0666 should work but that basically has the same security
implications.  I don't know if the printer utility has any special
requirements that dictate execute permissions and also don't know what
is responsible for the firmware upload.  I do know that the non-free
scanner plugin are (should be) able to upload the firmware themselves.

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