[sane-devel] GUI for sane configuration

[Oliver Schwartz]

Hi,

> > Consider for example the path to a firmware file which has to be
> > configured. Since firmware files cannot be freely redistributed this
> > would be very hard to do without user interaction.
>
> I am not sure if we need a gui for this, a simple error message of the
> kind:
>
> copy agfa snapscan xyz firmware file blah.abc to
> /usr/local/share/sane/agfa/firmware/
>
> would do the same.

I agree in principal, although displaying an error message from a backend is 
not trivial. An installation GUI would make it clear that certain steps have 
to be performed before SANE is usable, whereas this solution presents the 
user with an error message to which he has to react. In a worst case scenario 
he may even have to react to a number of error messages one by one, which 
would certainly be annyoing.

> > Another example are scanner types for USB scanners
> > on systems that don't support vendor / product ID queries via ioctl.
>
> I think in this case the main effort should be to add support for vendor /
> product ID queries
> and ioctl functions to the system.
>
> It always produces more problems when you create a workaround for a problem
> instead of removing the primary problem. We should take care not to make
> this fault.
>
> I am not against configuration-GUI if it makes sense, but we should try to
> make sane run out of the box, that is much more user friendly than a
> configuration-GUI.

I agree that it's the cleaner solution to "just get it right", but this may 
not always be feasible. E.g. how do we convince Sun that we need an 
additional ioctl in Solaris?

Regards,

Oliver