Following my earlier posting of 24th July 1998 (mail/sane/980724.tx) :-
> I received the following today from PIE. It seems that after all my
> questions and emails they have decided that they don't want to release
> the technical documentation for their Scanace II series of scanners to
> me either with or without an NDA.
>
> > It had been very difficult to get the managment to accept your request last
> > time.
> >
> > Following your last mail that I transmitted to the persons concermed, the
> > decision to release informations to the public has be reconsidered. The
> > outcome is that there are more risk to to that than any gains we could get.
> >
> > So the position now is not to release the informations you request.
> >
> > Sorry. I will let you know if there is a change in the policy.
>
> Could the KOTL please update the site to indicate that PIE will not be
> supported. I do not want other people to go out and buy PIE products
> only to find that they have no SANE support.
>
> If PIE reconsider and do release the information, I will keep you
> informed, however it looks extremely unlikely at the moment.
>
> It seems such a pity to have been corresponding with them for over four
> months to be turned down at the final hurdle.
I ended up entering into a more lengthy dialogue with PIE and they did
eventually agree to my suggestions on the NDA and sent me one. I have
now signed the NDA and received the technical details, so can the KOTL
now update the information held to indicate that a backend is under
development (though don't hold your breath for a quick release due to a
change in my personal circumstances).
To all the other developers, now that I am in possession of the data, I
would like to start somewhere and I would appreciate some guidance,
especially as some of this is new ground to me.
More specifically :-
1) Are there any stubs available that I just fill in the relevant parts
of to make the driver work or do I have to start the whole thing from
scratch ?
2) Now I have the spec, what do I do next ? Here I'm concerned that I
may be reinventing the wheel, i.e. the scanace kit may be very close
to an already developed driver, with the NDA I can't say "Does this
look familiar ?" I have to compare with every driver to see what is
available, this will probably be longer than starting from 0.
The C isn't a problem, I understand the API but I would appreciate some
discussion on the various development techniques used, e.g. "I tried
using SCSI setting XYZ and had major problems" or "I Rebooted the machine
and Scanner before EVERY test" etc. As much help as possible would be
appreciated - simply because the time I can devote to this is now VERY
limited so it must be as smooth as possible.
Regards,
Dave Restall
mail/sane/980906.tx sane
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