[sane-devel] In progress: TRUST Imagery 9600SP (TECO_VM6552)

[Ralph D. Ungermann]

Hello Frank,

A month ago, I learned, that you do not maintain these drivers any more
(I thought it was the headline of http://www.zago.net/sane, but I can't
find it there any more).  I'm highly pleased to see you here.  Let me
take the chance to thank you for the code and its documentation.
Without that, I'd have had no chance to get my scanner working (and I
really had a minute's silence before deleting your function
adjust_raster()).


Frank Zago wrote:
> m. allan noah wrote:
[to Gerard Klaver]
>> Gerard- Sorry, I thought these backends were all unmaintained. I
>> stand corrected.
>> 
>> Can you say how similar the protocol is on all these machines? Is
>> it reasonable to combine the backends?
>> 
> No. There is 3 backends for a reason. I could take a look at Ralph's 
> code and make sure it's indeed different than the other scanners.  In
>  that case the best solution would be to create a teco4 backend.

 From a diff between teco2.c and teco3.c, I cannot figure out, why you
decided to separate them.  Your hints are welcome.  I'll send you (and
Gerard) my sources when I'm back home.  But let me redirect the further
discussion of this topic to my response to Gerard's post, please.

For now, let me recapitulate:

a) I have a working driver for the VM6552.  We can *add* it to S.A.N.E.
as teco4, so everybody in this world will have it on his/her hard disk
tomorrow.  Allan obvoisly has no problem with wasting other people's
disk space, but I'm afraid, that nobody out there needs it, because
today only one VM6552 scanner has survived, and that lucky one is
sitting on my desk at home.  So I'm still hesitating.

b) I didn't intentionally add anything special to the VM6552.  So I
presume, that my driver will still work with the VM3552, and thus may
*replace* the existing teco3 backend.  This would actually _save_ the
world's disk space.  But I have no way to prove it, and I hesitate to
deliver untested software.

c) My main achievements are putting the colors right, and slimming
resource usage.  These may be also applicable to teco2.  I'll stay in
contact with Gerard for that purpose, and we'll take care, that this
will _not_ lead to teco5.

> since I don't have any scanner left I don't think it's a good idea to
>  patch an existing backend besides fixing obvious bugs.

Agreed!  Unless nobody with a VM3552 helps us, this will rule out b).
I'll sleep over it, and probably become the maintainer of teco4.  But
I'd appreciate you having a glance at my code before.

-- ralph