Hi everyone, Sorry for the late follow-up (I'm preparing for a talk at AsiaOSS and a seminar I have to give in Singapore -- I won't be able to read mail from Aug 31 - Sep 9).
I've summarised your concerns and forwarded them up the food chain. >From there they should hopefully make it to the people at EPSON who decide (and pay for) what kind of work EPSON KOWA does on iscan. FWIW, personally I agree with most, if not all, of your opinions and am, in my free time, working on patches for a few of them. It's just that I can't get time scheduled to incorporate them in our official releases :-( Julien BLACHE <j...@jblache.org> writes: > Johannes Meixner <jsm...@suse.de> wrote: > >> According to Olaf (if I understand him correctly) the iscan >> frontend is the real problem. This would no longer work without >> the proprietary libs. > > We -really- do not care about iscan, as it's very epkowa-centric and > would not really suit another backend very well. > >> Perhaps the proprietary libs could be replaced by free dummy >> libs which provide the same function calls so that the frontend >> has something to call but the dummy functions result only an error >> code which is defined in the frontend so that the frontend doesn't >> crash but show an error message to the user. > > AFAIR, the binary libs for the frontend implement some image > manipulation routines, so nothing really critical for the iscan > frontend (although IIRC it counts for a great part of iscan's > features). > > For the backend, it's a bit more problematic. You can't simply put > dummy libs and return an error code; you need to disable the affected > scanners and error out if you need to load the said libraries. (you > could do that dynamically, ie check for the existence of the libraries > at runtime, so the user would get a chance to grab the libs if he > really needs them) > > Using the backend without the binary libs isn't that hard, it would > only take a couple of hours to make sure everything works fine. > > Using the frontend without the binary libs isn't that easy, and it > isn't terribly useful either. > > JB. > > -- > Julien BLACHE <http://www.jblache.org> > <j...@jblache.org> GPG KeyID 0xF5D65169 > -- Olaf Meeuwissen EPSON KOWA Corporation, PF1 FSF Associate Member #1962 sign up at http://member.fsf.org/ GnuPG key: 6BE37D90/AB6B 0D1F 99E7 1BF5 EB97 976A 16C7 F27D 6BE3 7D90 Penguin's lib! -- I hack, therefore I am -- LPIC-2
