[sane-devel] moving to C11 or later?

[Ralph Little]

Hi,

On 2026-08-16 12:00, James Ring wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Is there any interest in requiring C11 or later in sane-backends? It
> would be nice to be able to delete sane's copies of e.g. snprintf,
> getenv.

I think this is a fairly good idea. We surely don't have any target 
systems these days that do not support C11 and I don't like the idea of 
having ancient versions of these functions with all their probable 
warts, bugs and likely lack of modern features.

> How about cleaning up the build a bit? Perhaps moving away from
> autotools and towards something like cmake?

I'm not sure about this. I will give it some thought. If we stick to 
autotools, it certainly needs to be brought up-to-date. Some of the 
autotools files in the backends repo contain ancient, anacronistic items 
and they need an upgrade, something that I have plans to do. We started 
this in the frontends repo and for xsane, and in those cases I 
regenerated them from scratch, they are *that* old.

I have no personal objection to CMAKE and have used it in the past and 
it supports more platforms than autotools. I'm just not sure that we 
have the manpower to go through that kind of process and wonder if it 
really benefits the project substantially. It would certainly benefit 
other platforms that we do not directly support (e.g. Windows/macOS) but 
since the main maintainers of SANE do not use those systems, builds for 
those systems they would surely whither over time....

Cheers,
Ralph

>
> I have some free time coming up and I'd be interested in helping the
> sane project in these or any other ways where there's a need.
>
> Thanks,
> James
>