[sane-devel] Pixma future

[Ralph Little]

Hi Povilas (and the group),
I have been working some changes for pixma on a branch for issue #264,
support for MX492.
It has been quite a long meandering journey and, although I have fixed a
few actual backend bugs, I'm not really happy with the direction that I
have taken and would like to restart with a better idea in mind of where
it is going to go.

To be honest, I have learned a lot along the way and I would have
preferred to be able to reduce the changes down to much smaller pieces.

Much of that effort has been sorting out the distinction between
frontend and backend line_size computed values which lay at the source
of much of what doesn't work with the lineart support.

So, I propose to terminate that branch and start afresh. I could open
new branches and add the definite, smaller real bug fixes that are
practical to review and individually merge. In particular, the
revelations related to the imageClass ADF.

It occurs to me that you probably have your own plans as to how you
would like to develop the pixma backend and I would be interested in
your views before I start anything major.

In particular:

1) Are you intending a genesys-style rewrite, perhaps in C++?

2) What do you think about dropping emulated lineart from the backend
altogether? That would certainly simplify the backend considerably.

Cheers,
Ralph