Hubert Figuiere wrote: > > On samedi, fév 8, 2003, at 19:41 Europe/Paris, abel deuring wrote: > > [ snipped useless-and-out-of-topic rant ] > > > I also had a short look into Apple's mailing list archives. The > > answers to a question by Beat regarding device access from forked > > processes seem to indicate there is really not hope. The main reason > > seems to be "too complicated to implement for Mach". (BTW, the > > archives of older mailings are the worst organized archives I have > > seen since a long time. So much for the shiny surface of Apple > > stuff...) > > [...] > > Somebody proposed to the apple mailing list to start a sort of a > > daemon which accesses the device. Since sockets (pipes too?) seem to > > survive a fork on macos, this could indeed be a way to avoid the > > current fork hassles. Other ways would be to provide a non-forking > > version of the backend (like the Sharp and NEC backends do), or to > > make the backends thread-safe (should not be that much work, since the > > tasks of the two processes/threads are different enough), and to > > expand the sanei_thread library. > > I'm not really an IOKit expert, but perhaps should one write a generic > device driver for USB that just create proper device entries. > > I suggest emulating *BSD USB behaviour. That way, we then would need to > change libusb to use *BSD code and we would have a better > compatibility. IOKit use as its advantage, like allowing USB access in > userland, but the mach_port problem is not a simple issue. > > Just a thought, I'll dig further to see what can be done (not sure I'll > have the time to actually code anything)
Hubert, don't want to discourage you (after all, this approach would save the Sane developer some work ;), but Beat has already asked about such things on Apple's Unix-porting mailing list, and the answers were not very promising: http://lists.apple.com/mhonarc/unix-porting/msg01809.html http://lists.apple.com/mhonarc/unix-porting/msg01814.html (fortunately on the better oganized part of the mailing lsit archive, at least currently) Please note the password hints in the authentication dialog. Abel
