Johannes Meixner <jsm...@suse.de> wrote: > As far as I understand you: > On the one hand > you said that users don't want to bother with config tools > and then I assume you even more want that users should't need > to bother with reading man pages and editing config files manually. > On the other hand > it seems you do not want computer read/writeable config file formats.
A config file should be human-readable, otherwise it's not a config file. Because a non human-readable format would be easier to deal with at the code level isn't a good enough argument. For our needs, both XML and PPD are more than over-engineered solutions, and would probably require more support code, which means more bugs, etc. It also means someone must maintain that code. Remember that SANE stands for Scanner Access Now Easy, and think about what happened to SMTP and SNMP for instance, which aren't simple anymore. > Don't you see that the real reason for all the discussion is > how to make the setup more user friendly even for those scanners > which need special settings (i.e. which don't work with the default > built-in settings of the backend)? And we can perfectly do that without resorting to a special config tool, without introducing XML or PPD config files. > One approach is to have a special user setup frontend (a setup tool) > and such a tool requires computer read/writeable config file formats. Another approach would be to introduce the notion of scanner profile in the backends, which would become an option settable in the frontend. > Even what Oliver Rauch proposed with the "CONFIGURE flag" > includes a computer read/writeable config data format. > I like Oliver's proposal very much because it doesn't require > a special user setup frontend. Yep. I am getting seriously tired of the current tendency to introduce configuration wizards, panels, control centers and the like, when nothing of the sort is really needed. This is not Windows, everybody please wake up. And I tend to get angry at that shit when the use of the said wizard is made mandatory by the use of a non human-readable configuration file. Hope you'll get my point a bit better now. JB. -- Julien BLACHE <http://www.jblache.org> <j...@jblache.org> GPG KeyID 0xF5D65169
