[sane-devel] Pixma future

[Ralph Little]

Hi,


On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 11:13 AM Povilas Kanapickas <povilas at radix.lt>
wrote:

> Hi Ralph,
>
> On 11/23/20 12:33 AM, Ralph Little wrote:
>
> >
> > 1) Are you intending a genesys-style rewrite, perhaps in C++?
>
> Yes. I plan to extract reusable parts of the genesys backend and use
> that from any other backends.
>
> Even without that, I've found that at least in the case of genesys
> backend, a rewrite to C++ fixed a large number of small bugs that
> require strong discipline to avoid in C. The largest category were bugs
> in error handling and bugs in memory handling. This is I guess not
> surprising as both of these are done manually in C.
>
> I plan to start the rewrite next month, so it would be great if any
> fixes could be submitted until then as the codebase may change
> substantially.
>
> OK, I will assemble the actual fixes and drop them into a new branch.
Then we can review and merge them.



> > 2) What do you think about dropping emulated lineart from the backend
> > altogether? That would certainly simplify the backend considerably.
>
> The same has been done in the genesys backend. I think we need a wrapper
> backend that would generate lineart automatically if the downstream
> backend does not support that.
>
> Right now I'm thinking about how this could be implemented.
>

One way to deal with that would be for me to add Lineart as a filter to
xsane as a postprocess option.
Command line users could make the lineart conversion another phase of their
workflow, using a tool like imagemagick.
I think that a lot of people view this kind of thing as something that the
frontend should provide, with the backend merely exposing the native
capabilities of the hardware. We have a number of backends doing emulation
of functions that the hardware cannot do and they all seem to do it in
their own special way, increasing the code size measurably.

Which reminds me, I really need to get back to xsane. I'm a terrible one
for distraction :(

Cheers,
Ralph
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