[sane-devel] misleading support status explanation?

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 10:33:54AM +0200, Johannes Meixner wrote:
> I think the explanation what "complete" means may be misleading
> for normal users because normally the nice buttons for e-mail,
> printing and whatever stuff on the scanners are not supported.

One could argue that in this case the status is not "complete" :-)
There are some programs for reading buttons, but I don't know if they
implement anything else but scanning. Most other functions would be
easy to add by the different modes of xsane.

Anyway, I agree that for scanners, the status should refer to scanning
and not to buttons or printing function or whatever.

Maybe we should just add one sentence before the detailed status
explanation like this: 

For scanners, status refers to the scanning function only. Other
features like buttons or the printing function of
multi function devices are not considered.

Ok, two sentences :-)

> I think to avoid user complaints it should be more clear
> that "everything the device can do" actually means
> "every scanning mode the device can do".

That's not all what I intended to express. The status is not limited
to scanning modes, but also to features like ADF/TA support, quality
calibration, gamma correction and image quality. In short, everything
the scanner can do in its hardware.

E.g. if a backend supports all modes the scanner can do in perfect
quality but the scanhead moves only with 20% of the possible speed I
wouldn't call the support "complete".

> Indicates how many of the scanning modes the device provides
> are supported by SANE.

Also, I don't want to emphasize the "scanning" too much as there are
other devices than scanners which are supported by SANE. While
scanners are in the focus, cameras shouldn't be excluded.

Bye,
  Henning