Re: Planning Gnome Scan Inclusion

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Sun, 2006-09-10 at 17:14 +0200, �ienne Bersac wrote:
> Hi
> > Suggest to just use a HAL addon for the D-BUS service, it's designed to
> > do exactly this kind of thing. 
> 
> I completely agree. I said "dbus-service" because i didn't investigate
> enough in hal to see what is possible. I'm glad to see that such feature
> exists.

Cool.

> I wonder if this HAL addon will be able to share device (e.g. configure
> saned and publish with avahi and detect avahi share with gnomescan).

I think you want to handle all interactions for sharing / discovering
scanners using Avahi, at the desktop session level. This is because I
think these activities (deciding to share a scanner / deciding to use a
scanner that is shared) are inherently per-user. 

Ideally, you just patch gnome-hardware-manager [1] to share the scanner,
e.g. the g-h-m UI exposes an option in the UI

 [ ] Share scanners on the network

and optionally it provides some UI for the user to set the name of the
scanner, e.g. "davidz's scanner", "scanner in 3rd floor design lab" or
"skanner p�redie sal i design lokalet" (e.g. localized into e.g.
danish!). 

This should all be controlled by gconf keys so we can reap the benefits
of lockdown etc. Also, when we get infrastructure for running policy
daemons (such as g-h-m, g-p-m, nm-applet etc.) when no-one is logged in
this is also good for the "scanner server" use-case. With this, one
simply installs a GNOME distro on a box, sets "[X] Share scanners on the
network" as system default [2] and there you go! [3]

For discovery of scanners using Avahi, I think you just want to hook
that into your GnomeScan dialog or similar, yes?

Cheers,
David

[1] : or is it gnome-device-manager? Anyway, what used to be called
gnome-volume-manager. Or maybe it's not renamed yet? I'll call it g-h-m
for the remainder of this mail..

[2] : I suspect that the UI bits for desktop policy daemons such as
g-p-m, g-h-m and nm-applet will have "Set these settings as system-wide"
and if the user clicks it these settings will be copied to /etc/gconf,
e.g. the system-wide location. Of course the user will have to auth in
this case (as himself or as root) but that's one reason I started
writing PolicyKit.. Anyway, off-topic in this mail...

[3] : in the same vein, it would be nice for g-h-m to have a feature to
share some/all (external, maybe also internal) storage drives using
Avahi. Sounds like a fun and small project for someone to hack on,
possibly it needs some integration with e.g. gnome-user-share. Would be
a really nice feature though, would help extend our (GNOME) reach even
more into the data center and the world of sys admins.