Re: Planning Gnome Scan Inclusion

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Sun, 2006-09-10 at 18:47 +0200, �ienne Bersac wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I don't understand why share a scanner per user. If multiple session are
> open. Do we see multiple scanner in avahi ? That does not make any
> sense !

If I plug two scanners into my machine I would expect Avahi to announce
both scanners as separate entities. And with suitable names too. E.g.
"Huge A3 scanner at 3rd floor design lab" and "Even huger A2 scanner at
3rd floor design lab". 

(Come to think of this, this is not an odd requirement at all. Suppose
I'm a small design company, I buy a dedicated machine and attach my two
scanners to it.)

Don't you think this is the user experience we want?

And, sure, Avahi can advertise multiple instances of the same service on
different ports. Just look for yourself; e.g. if I have two users 'foo'
and 'bar' logged in and both use gnome-user-share, Avahi will advertise
both "foo's public files" and "bar's public files". And each have a
httpd process running using a different port. Each running in the
respective user session. It's just the way things work if I understand
Zeroconf/Avahi correctly.

> I don't want to be crappy, but i feel sane people behavior similar XF86
> people. Trust me, they will *never* accept such patch. They didn't even
> respond to the announce of Gnome Scan. (Seems xsane is the ultimate sane
> frontend for such people).

Well, I didn't follow that thread but sometimes that is just how free
software works. Most free software maintainers are grumpy by nature so
they like to take a wait-and-see approach. I'm sure, however, that they
are interested in better desktop integration with their project, after
all what you're doing is in a big way good for them giving GNOME's wide
usages.

> I really don't want to fork alone saned. Also because i will also fork
> sane itself if i do so !
> 
> Really, as long as i'm alone working on that, i want to just write a
> SANE frontend. Just reusing what exists as far as possible. Once i know
> better how work SANE, once i will dive into SANE code, i will send
> patche and see if the amount of patchs worth a fork. I really don't want
> to fork such project.

Oh, I never said "fork all of SANE" but I can see it might have come
across as it. Sorry about that, definitely didn't mean it that way.

Btw, looking at saned, it's not a lot of code

 http://cvs.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/sane-backends/frontend/saned.c?rev=1.40&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&cvsroot=sane

and I can't see why the SANE people would reject such a feature request
if we just are careful about stating why we want this. It's not like
we're asking them to change the world, we're just asking for features
that makes it easy to do very nice desktop integration. I can't see why
they would object to that.

> Also, note that the first goal is hal. Then sharing. And all of that is
> for 2.20.

Sounds good. I really appreciate you're working on this. Let me know if
I can be of any help, either by helping with the HAL integration or the
scanner sharing stuff / talking to SANE developers.

Keep rocking!

Cheers,
David