[sane-devel] Blank names and descs for Group options

[Benjamin Gordon]

On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 11:03 AM Ralph Little <skelband at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> Wanted to get views from the more seasoned devs on this topic.
> The SANE API spec says that Name and Desc for attributes are not valid for
> options of type SANE_TYPE_GROUP, but is not prescriptive about what those
> values should be initialized to in those cases.
>
> My gut says that they should be NULL, but a lot of backends set them to "".
>
>
>From the poking around I've done, at least some frontends assume name has a
valid pointer in it.  I found a couple where they dereference name without
checking if it's NULL at all and others that skip over options that have
name == NULL.  scanimage itself falls into the second category in
print_options(), so it doesn't print groups unless they have a non-NULL
name pointer.  It seems like even if NULL is technically a valid value
here, better compatibility with existing frontends is achieved by setting
it to "".

Thanks,
Benjamin
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