[sane-devel] libsane-dsseries Brother DSmobile scanner backend

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi Marinel,

Marinel S. Sigue writes:

> https://gitlab.com/sane-project

That's the SANE Project's GitLab group.  It's used to track the code for
a number of SANE frontends (applications) and SANE backends (backends)
that are maintained by SANE Project members.

The SANE API (sane.h) is in the public domain so anyone is free to make
their own SANE frontends and backends.  Such "third-party" frontends and
backends are not maintained by the SANE Project members, nor are they
"under the umbrella" of the SANE Project.

Some example frontends are Simple Scan and gscan2pdf.  On the backend
side of things, Brother, Canon, EPSON, and several other vendors ship
their own and do so under a license of their own liking.  Other people
(may) have implemented SANE backends to satisfy their own needs.

Unfortunately, not everyone has seen the benefits that Free Software can
offer :-/ so quite often (but not always!) the vendor backends are under
a license that allows them to keep the source code away from you :-((

> So I saw this website for sane and was wondering where is the
> libsane-dsseries backend for Brother DSmobile scanner? I know it's
> supported by sane since it can be downloaded from the brother website

Ok, you're mixing things up a little here.  If it can be downloaded from
Brother's website, Brother is the one supporting it (for some definition
of support :-/).  If it can be found on https://gitlab.com/sane-project,
the SANE Project members are supporting it.

# I should mention though that quite a few backends are unmaintained.
# Such backends are in need of someone who understands the backend's
# code (or is willing to learn :-).

> and I found it at this link:
> https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/libsane-dsseries/.

That only seems to provide an Arch Linux targetted "installer" for
Brother's package.  Have a look at the PKGBUILD file to see what it
does.  It basically just downloads the thing from Brother's site and
wraps it as an Arch package.

> I was wondering if I could tinker with its code to change the default
> max page size which is 14 inches to make it 32.

Unless Brother provides the sources for their libsane-dsseries SANE
backend, I'm afraid you cannot.

> Can anyone help me with this though? I'm fairly new to programming and
> all. I'll really appreciate any feedback regarding this.

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