>>>>> On Fri, 04 Aug 2000 11:26:30 -0700, Stephen Williams <steve@icarus.com> said:
Stephen> Well, I think what scanner vendors in general want to do is
Stephen> be able to write their own dialog box that the user can use
Stephen> to configure the scanner in magical and scanner specific
Stephen> ways. At the TWAIN level, that sort of thing does make
Stephen> sense, I think. (At the SANE level, it does not as private
Stephen> tags are the way to handle these. I imagine this scanner
Stephen> specific dialog can use the standard SANE protocol to
Stephen> communicate.)
Stephen> Of course, I'm coming from the perspective of a
Stephen> high-performance scanner manufacturer where $0.05 worth of
Stephen> labor won't kill us, but not having the desired convenient
Stephen> access to Nifty Feature X really hurts.
In my mind, that's a separate issue. Yes, I do think that there may
be a need to reserve a range of SANE_TYPE_* numbers for
vendor-specific options. If we do this, I'd really like to see some
sort of certification procedure to ensure that this mechanism doesn't
get abused. Basically, the goal would be to ensure that the vendor
specific options are used only when absolutely necessary and that the
scanner always remains usable with the standard options.
Of course, a scanner vendor would want/need to provide a custom front
end to be able to make use of these options. However, I think this is
different from simply trying to write a fancy-looking custom frontend
for the standard SANE options, so I think we should keep them
separate. I.e., there are two issues here:
(i) how to customize the look of the scanner dialog
(ii) how to provide an "escape" or "pass-through" mechanism that
permits for more extensibility (and how to do this without
completely breaking interoperability)
--david
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