[sane-devel] Re: [PATCH] generate hal fdi file

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, 2007-03-02 at 20:22 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> Hi,

And since my original message is being held for being too big, here's
the full text. Thanks.

> 
> There's been various threads about this on both this and the hal list
> and SUSE got something in their SRPM that does something vaugely
> similar. Basically the attached patch generates a hal fdi file for
> identifying the devices that the userspace drivers in the sane-backends
> package can drive. This is useful for a number of things
> 
>  - it's easy to discover supported scanners through HAL
> 
>  - distros can use the new ACL framework in HAL to manage permissions
>    (which in particular is useful for fast-user-switching and, in the
>     future, things like multi-seat) and migrate from udev-based
>    permission settings schemes
> 
> The generated file tools/hal/10-libsane.fdi should be installed
> into /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/20thirdparty/. That's something that
> vendors want to do in the %install part of the RPM or similar.
> 
> Now, on my Fedora system I see that hplip is also providing a libsane
> backend. My next mission is to make a patch for them as well (plus fix
> up the fact that any user, even remote, can use the scanner which some
> people might consider a security bug). That's going to be, uh, well, fun
> since it involves parsing /usr/share/hplip/data/models/models.dat. Btw,
> does anyone know why HP just didn't submit patches to this project? The
> whole hplip thing reminds me a bit of Windows....
> 
> Anyway, thanks for considering this patch!
> 
>      David
> 
>