Olaf Meeuwissen <olaf.meeuwissen at avasys.jp> wrote: Hi,
> The epkowa backend is free-as-in-freedom software. It is licensed > under the terms of the GPL and carries an exception that allows for > the use of non-free extensions. "It's free software <tiny>(but for this and this and this and this model you need a binary-only, proprietary lib, too)</tiny>" Not exactly free by my book, I'm sorry but it really does make a difference. > Of the 181 models (by market name) supported by the backend 35 require > such a non-free extension. > > # Unfortunately, an increasing proportion of the recents models > # requires one. And I'm saying all that with that knowledge, as we discussed epkowa quite a few times :) > Not claiming that the epkowa backend does a perfect job either, but > at least the epson backend does not support a number of all-in-ones. TTOMK the all-in-ones are all pretty similar devices? > Moreover, and in case you missed this, the epson backend is _not_ > maintained anymore. I didn't miss it, but AFAIK epson2 supports everything supported by epson and more. > BTW, many thanks for packaging the epkowa backend in libsane-extras > for Debian ;-) but can you tell me why libsane has to depend on it? > What breaks in libsane if I yank libsane-extras? The udev rules in libsane-extras were buggy; it was absolutely harmless until I migrated to a new layout for installing udev rules, then all hell broke loose and the only option to avoid rendering systems unbootable was to have that dependency. And now I no longer have to ask "do you have libsane-extras installed?" in bug reports, which is a selling point, really ;) > # We're about to start providing Image Scan! for Linux .debs and this > # is a bit of a show-stopper conflict ... Use a diversion on libsane-epkowa.* to handle that, that's the best option. Note that I would have packaged iScan, had Epson provided a tarball with all the interpreters libraries. As it stands, I once managed to grab all the RPMs by playing with the webserver but: - no way I was going to do that long-term - no way I am extracting the files from a collection of RPMs every time - redistribution is prohibited IIRC JB. -- Julien BLACHE <http://www.jblache.org> <jb at jblache.org> GPG KeyID 0xF5D65169
