[sane-devel] Epson Perfection V500 Photo

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

"Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg at tristatelogic.com> writes:

> In message <87fwi43zbq.fsf at avasys.jp>, 
> Olaf Meeuwissen <olaf.meeuwissen at avasys.jp> wrote:
>
>>WRT FreeBSD support, may I suggest you submit a support request[2] so we
>>get concrete info on how badly people want this.
>
> I'm not sure that I understand your request.  Could you elaborate?

Submit a support request saying you want to use your V500 scanner with
FreeBSD but that the current iscan packages + interpreter package don't
work.  The decision makers don't read the mailing list.  They do get an
overview of the support requests we get.  *You* have to put your issue
on *their* radar.

> I mean I want it.  I want it bad.  How bad?  On a scale from one to ten?
> Well, you know, I suppose that there are many things in this life that I
> want more... youth, good looks, lots of money...

;-)

> If you are thinking that many other people will suddenly arise from out of
> the woodwork to clamor for a FreeBSD port of your driver, once I have formally
> done so, well I seriously don't think that's realistic.  It's clear that
> FreeBSD doesn't have nearly the market penetration of Linux at this point,
> so there is never going to be a numerically huge demand.  But those of us
> who use FreeBSD sure would think kindly of your company if you helped us
> on on this.

No, that's not what I'm thinking but if you don't get your issue on the
radar of those who decide what get's done and what doesn't, it won't
even be considered.

> [...snip...]
>
> P.S.  If you guys already have the code to make this work, then why not just
> do a FreeBSD port and release it as "unsupported"?  I cannot imagine that
> doing that would take much work on your part.  I mean it isn't as if Linux
> and FreeBSD are such radically different environments.  In fact they are
> virtually identially in most respects.  And also, as I understand it, access
> to this typr of scanner on FreeBSD is now performed exclusively through a
> low-level thing called "libusb" which is presenting some sort of nice clean
> API to higher level code that wants to access USB devices.  So if your code
> already knows how to interface to libusb on Linux... well... I mean seriously,
> how hard would it be to just recompile the stuff for FreeBSD and then just
> stick the result on your FTP server under unsupported/ or something like that?
>
> Of course, if you are willing to do this I'll be more than happy to volunteer
> to be the guinea pig and test the thing out for you and see if it even works.

You might want to include this in your support request.

Hope this helps,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2           FLOSS Engineer -- AVASYS CORPORATION
FSF Associate Member #1962               Help support software freedom
                 http://www.fsf.org/jf?referrer=1962