[sane-devel] 1.0.25 is out, now what?

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Sorry for the late follow-up.

Alessandro Zummo writes:

> On Wed, 21 Oct 2015 21:32:37 +0900
> Olaf Meeuwissen <paddy-hack at member.fsf.org> wrote:
> [...]
>> API change.  Given the schedule for 1.0.26, I don't think that is doable
>> within that time frame.  If we are going to change the API, there are
>> probably a *lot* of things we should work out before we can commit to
>
>  luckily we have only a few frontends to check for and most of
>  them will correctly bail out when given an unknown frame type.

I'm not thinking about just adding a frame type.  There are a number of
things that can be improved (progress indication, batch scanning among
others).  If we are to make changes, we may as well address those too.
And when we do, there will be soversion bump so there will be nothing
that needs to be checked for current frontends.

>  given that there are a very few users that would try it I do not
>  think we will be receiving a lot of reports of bad frontends.
>
>  once xsane, scanimage, gimp and a few others have been verified
>  to work we'd have covered the vast majority 
>
>> anything.  One of those things would be a clearly documented mechanism
>> for API changes so that backends *and* frontends can deal with them in a
>> graceful and sane manner (pun intended) and changes can be made in a

This is meant to allow for more gradual API changes without needing a
soversion bump, in case that was not clear.  Note though that I am not
sure that this is even possible but it is something to think about.

>  I haven't checked but I think that it's written somewhere that a frontend
>  should correctly behave when given an unknown frame type.

I cannot find anything.  I checked the sane_get_parameters() spec and
the Image Data Format sections.

Hope this helps,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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