[sane-devel] SANE V2

[Diego Zuccato]

Henning Meier-Geinitz wrote:

> So the backend would call the callback immediatly, when a fatal error
> occurs. Fatal means, that it will return anything other than
> SANE_STATUS_GOOD. This would work for command-line programs but may be
> messy for graphical frontends.
Errr... Since you're defining a new API, then why not return a ptr to
typedef struct {
	int	errornum;
	const	char *errmsg;
} SANE_error;
or momething similar ?
This way, the failing function sets both the numerical error code AND
the (verbose) error message.
You don't like structs? :-)
Then a success might be indicated by a NULL ptr, while an error is a
string like "NNN verbose message follows error code" (like many net
progs already do).
Want numerical error code? atoi(retval) and you get it. Is atoi() too
slow? Then use
#define ERRCODE(rv) (rv?(rv[0]*10+rv[1])*10+rv[2]:0)

So you could even have the same error code for different error messages.
Really useful when debugging a module: the error code tells the failure
type, and the rest of the message helps tracing it down. The pointer
should point to a list of static strings, so it remains valid as long as
it's needed.

Just my $.01 :-)

BYtE,
 Diego.