[sane-devel] [janitorial] post 1.0.28

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi all,

It's been a week since the SANE Project released sane-backends-1.0.28.
With the exception of updating the website's manual pages, I think I've
taken care of all the release related "thingies".

# Updating the HTML version of the manual pages requires a tool from a
# site that no longer exists ... :-/
# I've been looking at using something else but with nothing so far that
# produces something acceptable.

Apart from that, I don't think we want to wait another two years or so
for our next release.  I would like to see our next release in four to
six months.  And the ones after that in a similar time frame.  How's
that sound?

For the one after 1.0.28, my first concern is getting the build to use
Debian 10 (up from 9) for the source tarballs.  Next, squatting all the
compiler warnings on Debian 10.  I really would like to keep the build
"clean" on Debian's stable.  Getting (and keeping) it clean on Alpine
and Fedora are secondary targets.

Our documentation, including the website(!), also needs updating and
this is something I'd like to start working on although I'm not quite
sure yet what direction to go in.  Markdown for files in git would
improve rendering in the GiLab web interface but GNU standards have
their own ideas about filenames.  Perhaps that some build tweak can
bridge that divide.

For the website, using one of the many static site generators could make
the site look more current as well as more maintainable.  Nobody really
likes plain HTML, I think.  That said, it's not just the looks, much of
the information is also badly dated.

Concerning the SANE API specification, I've been thinking of ripping it
out of the sane-backends code and convert it for use with Sphinx, even
setting up integration with readthedocs.io so the API spec would be
available in a versioned fashion as well as a "current" version on our
website.

# So many ideas, so little time ...

Of course, backend maintainers/developers can/will/should(?) continue to
add support for new devices and fix bugs.  If willing to help out with
anything mentioned above that would be appreciated but they/you should
not feel obliged to.

Suggestions and feedback welcome, here on the list or as issues against
an appropriate SANE Project project.  The list of projects is at

  https://gitlab.com/sane-project

For bright new ideas, please submit new issues (or follow up on similar
ones) as things on the mailing list tend to fall off the "radar".

For upstreaming of downstream patches, ditto.

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