On Thursday 14 December 2006 21:18, m. allan noah wrote: > On Thu, 14 Dec 2006, Giuseppe Sacco wrote: > > > Hi Gerard and all SANE developers, > > > > Il giorno gio, 14/12/2006 alle 13.40 +0100, Gerhard Jaeger ha scritto: > > [...] > >> But I think you are right, we are moving into a dead-end. We have > >> devices that are able to do much more than we are able to support > >> with the SANE 1 standard AND we have a not yet finished (if finished > >> ever) SANE 2 standard. > >> > >> I'd like to hear/read some more opinions on that. > >> Any? > > i would vote for re-openning the discussion of SANE2, and begin a project > to port a limited number of backends forward. use a whole new SONAME, such > that sane1 and 2 libs can co-exist for awhile. many backends will never be > ported to sane2, because the scanners have not been made in 10+ years, and > there is no-one to do it. > > my personal list of things other folks have mentioned: > > 1. i hate threading/forking in backends. it makes debugging a mess, and > there are plenty of non-interactive uses for sane that dont need it (the > single most popular front-end, scanimage, for one :) As per recent > discussions on this list, any frontend that cares about non-blocking, has > already implemented a threading solution to deal with all the backends > that block. lets drop the non-blocking functions.
okay - move that responsibility over to the frontends? Otherwise the responsiveness of i.e. XSane will decrease to zero. > 2. network protocol overhaul- this keeps coming up, but i dont understand > it fully. No idea about that, but I think there are others around. > 3. stackable/modular compression libs- lots of scanners give back jpeg as > their native format, and we usually open it up to a huge pixmap, just to > hand to front-end. this is esp. noticable over saned. zlib, jpeg, what > else? ACK. > 4. inconsistent option names and arguments between backends. > 5. inconsistent gamma/brightness/contrast implementations (sanei_gamma > i have been playing with here) > 6. persistent device naming. none of this libusb:xxx stuff, i want > the backend to provide the name, using something like serial number, > rather than using the sanei_usb name. > 7. inconsistent conf file layouts- i actually would like to see something > more like samba.conf, with [sections], etc. > 8. inconsistent debug levels. not that big of a deal i guess. i would > rather that they were a bitmask instead of a linear progression. Full ACK. > 9. i HATE the frontends changing br-x/y and tl-x/y into t/b/l/r- i have a > front-end that takes cli args like scanimage, and i have to do the same > option manipulations so that users can use their scanimage commands in my > prog. it also means that my back-ends provided help text for those options > is not useful. > > 10. button support. getting better, but not there yet. ACK 11. Overhaul build system - Gerhard
