[sane-devel] The future of the SANE-Standard

[Oliver Rauch]

Am Mittwoch, den 19.12.2007, 19:27 +0100 schrieb Julien BLACHE:

> 
> Would you care to explain why the addition of new frame types
> would create any such problems ? Because that's the only thing that
> has been discussed so far - no ABI changes, no new functions in the
> API, just new frame types.

What is discussed in the moment is a "slow transformation from SANE1 to
SANE2" (I don't remeber the exact words). And we do not discuss only
some new frame types. It took about 30 minutes after this suggestion to
add several other things that are not compatible to SANE1.

And what all the people forget is that is may be a simple step to change
a backend to send a new frame or image type to the frontend.
For the frontends we get a lot of work to handle this. But here are one
or two frontend authors that try to discuss with several backend
authors.

We will get a lot of incompatibilites when we add several new frame
types. From the backend author's view this is not much work, the backend
simply sends the data the scanner produces. But the frontend authors
have to handle this.

Now some people will say that we do not need all frontends to handle all
frame types. But what is the adavantage of it when the frontends can not
handle it. It only makes sense to add e.g.  a TIFFg3FAX or JPEG frame
type when all frontends can handle this. But when we make this step,
then we should make the complet step to SANE2.

Best regards
Oliver