[sane-devel] SANE2, what do we want ?

[Julien BLACHE]

Olaf Meeuwissen <olaf.meeuwissen at avasys.jp> wrote:

Hi,

> The epkowa backend is free-as-in-freedom software.  It is licensed
> under the terms of the GPL and carries an exception that allows for
> the use of non-free extensions.

"It's free software <tiny>(but for this and this and this and this model you
need a binary-only, proprietary lib, too)</tiny>"

Not exactly free by my book, I'm sorry but it really does make a
difference.

> Of the 181 models (by market name) supported by the backend 35 require
> such a non-free extension.
>
> # Unfortunately, an increasing proportion of the recents models
> # requires one.

And I'm saying all that with that knowledge, as we discussed epkowa
quite a few times :)

> Not claiming that the epkowa backend does a perfect job either, but
> at least the epson backend does not support a number of all-in-ones.

TTOMK the all-in-ones are all pretty similar devices?

> Moreover, and in case you missed this, the epson backend is _not_
> maintained anymore.

I didn't miss it, but AFAIK epson2 supports everything supported by
epson and more.

> BTW, many thanks for packaging the epkowa backend in libsane-extras
> for Debian ;-) but can you tell me why libsane has to depend on it?
> What breaks in libsane if I yank libsane-extras?

The udev rules in libsane-extras were buggy; it was absolutely harmless
until I migrated to a new layout for installing udev rules, then all
hell broke loose and the only option to avoid rendering systems
unbootable was to have that dependency.

And now I no longer have to ask "do you have libsane-extras
installed?" in bug reports, which is a selling point, really ;)

> # We're about to start providing Image Scan! for Linux .debs and this
> # is a bit of a show-stopper conflict ...

Use a diversion on libsane-epkowa.* to handle that, that's the best
option.

Note that I would have packaged iScan, had Epson provided a tarball
with all the interpreters libraries. As it stands, I once managed to
grab all the RPMs by playing with the webserver but:
 - no way I was going to do that long-term
 - no way I am extracting the files from a collection of RPMs every time
 - redistribution is prohibited IIRC

JB.

-- 
Julien BLACHE                                   <http://www.jblache.org> 
<jb at jblache.org>                                  GPG KeyID 0xF5D65169