[sane-devel] Sandboxing scanner applications

[Alexander Pevzner]

On 9/18/20 8:08 PM, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> GTK portal "server" side (running outside the sandbox):
> https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/blob/master/src/print.c
> 
> Client side:
> https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk3-High-level-Printing-API.html
I've briefly reviewed printer portal API, looking also here:

https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/portal-api-reference.html#gdbus-org.freedesktop.portal.Print

And see that printer API is quite capable, based on an abstract printer 
model (as programmable object) similar to whatever defined by PWG and 
used in IPP.

However, SANE abstract model of scanner was defined many years ago and 
is a bit, well, outdated in comparison to whatever we have today from 
PWG (IPP-scan) or from Microsoft/W3C (WS-SCAN), and these two models are 
quite similar. For example, SANE doesn't provide a standard way to 
determine if scanner has ADF, and if scanner can scan to PDF and you 
need PDF, you still forced to obtain uncompressed image and then convert 
it to PDF by yourself.

If I understood your goals correctly, you are now about to define and 
implement portal API for scanner, which has some chances to be used for 
years. I think when this API is being defined, it makes a lot of sense 
to take existent PWD/WSD models into consideration.

-- 

	Wishes, Alexander Pevzner (pzz at apevzner.com)