[sane-devel] No response to merge requests for the genesys backend

Olaf Meeuwissen paddy-hack at member.fsf.org
Fri Nov 9 11:40:15 GMT 2018


Hi,

Povilas Kanapickas writes:

> Hi Gerhard,
>
> On 11/10/2018 08:44, Gerhard Jäger wrote:
>> Hi Povilas,
>>
>> On 10.10.18 at 23:31 Povilas Kanapickas wrote:

>>> If there's lack of manpower, is there any way I could be more involved
>>> in the project? I think sane serves an important mission by letting
>>> people use very old scanner hardware indefinitely, even after the
>>> proprietary drivers are no longer available for the operating systems
>>> used at the time. Over time this will significantly reduce the amount of
>>> perfectly good hardware thrown away at least in this sector.
>>>
>>> I have substantial experience developing low level systems software, so
>>> I'm confident I could potentially be useful to the project.
>>
>> I have the feeling that every new developer who likes to contribute
>> is welcome. Regarding pending and necessary work, Olaf has the overview.

The overview is up at https://gitlab.com/groups/sane-project/-/issues

Oh, and for SANE Project members with merge permissions, also at
https://gitlab.com/groups/sane-project/-/merge_requests of course.

>> If you'd like to take over maintenance of a certain backend - no
>> problem - I'd say.

As long as you work things out with the current maintainer(s), if any.
They're listed in the AUTHORS file with a (*) behind their name.  If
there are none ..., no-one's gonna object much ;-)

> Maintaining a backend could be a long term goal. I'm mostly interested
> in the genesys backend right now because I have access to more hardware.
> Of course it all depends on the the plans of the current maintainer :-)
>
> If there's lack of interest and time, I could take over maintenance
> sooner rather than later. The only issue in this case would be access of
> hardware - I would not feel confident without a way to test most
> configurations end to end and getting all the scanners would take some time.

That's a problem all of the backend maintainers have.  Most only have
access to a very limited set of devices that are supported by the
backend(s) they maintain.  Most of the time you just have to act in good
faith and rely on people out in the field to test you didn't break
things for their device.

Special casing code for a certain device migth be an option but doesn't
scale very well for backends that support more than a handful of devices.

Still interested?  Just request access to the sane-project group as a
whole at https://gitlab.com/groups/sane-project/-/group_members or just
the backends project (if not interested in any of the other projects) at
https://gitlab.com/sane-project/backends/project_members.

Hope this helps (and apologies for the belated follow-up).
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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