[sane-devel] Strange behaviour by airscan

[Alexander Pevzner]

Hi Andrea,

On 10/23/20 11:15 PM, Andrea Croci wrote:

> Addressing the scanner as "airscan:e0:..." works great. Not a big 
> problem, I just find it kind of funny.

Well, it's a long story :-)

Airscan attempts to be user-friendly, not hacker-friendly. For this 
purpose, it returns list of devices, not list of connection endpoints (a 
device may have multiple endpoints: WiFi/Ethernet, HTTP/HTTPS, eSCL/WSD, 
...). Airscan attempts to list each physical device only once, 
regardless of how many endpoints it has.

SANE requires every device to have an unique name, and DNS-SD name of 
the device is a natural choice.

Unfortunately, there is no 100% guarantee that DNS-SD name is unique:
1. If computer connected to multiple networks (WiFi/Ethernet, for 
example), in theory these networks may contain devices with duplicated names
2. WSD doesn't have anything similar to DNS-SD name, its "namespace" is 
a space of device UUIDs. If device is visible simultaneously as DNS-SD 
device and WSD device, name is taken from the DNS-SD world. Otherwise, 
airscan fallbacks to the model name, which is also is not guaranteed to 
be unique across the network.

To ensure uniqueness, airscan prefixes every name with a short prefix, 
like e1 or w2. First character comes from protocol (e == eSCL, w == 
WSD), small number is assigned as UNIX PID: incremented every time new 
device is encountered with protection against assignment of number 
currently in use.

So this prefix depends in a order of device discovery (device, 
discovered first, will get smaller number).

It works nice with GUI programs, that allow to choose device from a 
list, but may make some inconvenience for people, who uses command-line 
tools, like scanimage. From another hand, nobody complained so far :-)

-- 

	Wishes, Alexander Pevzner (pzz at apevzner.com)