[sane-devel] Epson 4490 in Debian

[Johannes Meixner]

Hello,

On Jun 13 16:53 Olaf Meeuwissen wrote (shortened):
> Julien BLACHE <jb at jblache.org> writes:
> >
> > Ah thanks, that'll make my life easier :) The amount of work required
> > to get the backend in shape for inclusion is one of the reasons why
> > I'm not updating it more often

Some time ago I got a nice patch from Dirk O. Siebnich
from which I made our patch to build our iscan-free package
which is a really free version of the epkowa backend
(this means the /usr/bin/iscan frontend was also removed
because it requires a non-free library).

Julien,
I would appreciate it if the free version of Iscan would
be as much as possible the same on Debian and on Suse
(and on any other distribution).
If you (or any other distribution package maintainer) are
interested, please contact me.


> >> There is also a ./configure option to turn building of the frontend
> >> off to cater to non-i386 builds.
...
> I got a halfway sane patch (it ditched the frontend sources from the
> tarball :-{) and Johannes Meixner was bugging me at about the same
> time, so ...

Such a ./configure option is nice for internal testing but
it doesn't help us ("us" means at least Novell/Suse but I guess
it is the same for any distribution which provides sources)
to solve the license problem because the sources are the
crucial part regarding the license.

It doesn't help to have free binary packages built with whatever
kind of official or non-official "trick" when there is still
any kind of whatever non-free stuff left in the sources.
E.g. only mention a non-free license in some help-text in the
source even if there is actually no non-free program code
in the sources makes free sources tainted.

The only thing which makes us (same meaning as above) happy
are well seperated free sources and non-free stuff.


Olaf,
by the way:

Since the non-free model-specific stuff was split from the
Iscan sources (very many thanks for this!), I packaged
the non-free model-specific stuff into a seperated
"iscan-proprietary-drivers" RPM.

Unfortunately there seems to be no easy to use download
directory at Epson Avasys from which I could directly
download all your non-free model-specific RPMs.
At the moment I downloaded them by inspecting the docs
which models require non-free stuff and then I did
one or tow zillions of clicks in your Epson Avasys web-site
to download them :-(

Up to now I manually collected the following RPMs with non-free
model-specific stuff (from my iscan-proprietary-drivers.spec):
----------------------------------------------------------------------
# How to get the sources:
# See the README or epkowa.desc from the iscan package which models
# require proprietary driver libraries (in epkowa.desc those models
# have "non-free" in the comment).
# Go to http://www.avasys.jp/english/linux_e/dl_scan.html
# and select each of those models and download the iscan-plugin-*
# RPM (for gcc 3.4 or later).
# At the moment this are the following models and iscan-plugin-* RPMs:
# Perfection 1250 / Perfection 1250 PHOTO / GT-7200U
Source0:      iscan-plugin-gt-7200-1.0.0-1.c2.i386.rpm
# Perfection 1260 / Perfection 1260 PHOTO / GT-7300U
Source1:      iscan-plugin-gt-7300-1.0.0-1.c2.i386.rpm
# Perfection 2480 PHOTO / Perfection 2580 PHOTO / GT-F500 / GT-F550
Source2:      iscan-plugin-gt-f500-1.0.0-1.c2.i386.rpm
# Perfection 3170 PHOTO / GT-9400UF
Source3:      iscan-plugin-gt-9400-1.0.0-1.c2.i386.rpm
# Perfection 3490 PHOTO / Perfection 3590 PHOTO / GT-F520 / GT-F570
Source4:      iscan-plugin-gt-f520-1.0.0-1.c2.i386.rpm
# Perfection 4180 PHOTO / GT-F600
Source5:      iscan-plugin-gt-f600-1.0.0-1.c2.i386.rpm
# Perfection 4490 PHOTO / GT-X750
Source6:      iscan-plugin-gt-x750-1.0.0-1.c2.i386.rpm
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Is this list complete or did I miss something?

For example a nice tar archive which includes all the non-free
model-specific stuff would be nice.


Kind Regards
Johannes Meixner
-- 
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstrasse 5      Mail: jsmeix at suse.de
90409 Nuernberg, Germany                    WWW: http://www.suse.de/