4 ms·

Sounds like a nightmare, I guess SANE is an ironic name?

• wahern 6y ago
  IIUC, that example seems more like an indictment of the scanner manufacturers, not the developers of SANE. SANE includes that code because some manufacturers didn't implement such a simple, obvious, and crucial constraint in the hardware. Unless maybe the poster's point was that the SANE developers shouldn't try to support such fundamentally broken hardware?
  • bigbubba 6y ago
    I didn't mean to suggest that SANE was a poor project, I guess I just supposed it was sort of gallows humor from developers working on a hard problem.
• tialaramex 6y ago
  SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) is named that way because it does what people on minority platforms assumed TWAIN does on Windows / MacOS. TWAIN (sometimes said to mean "Toolkit Without An Interesting Name") looks like it's a universal API for scanners, except, the mandatory parts just spin up a graphical user interface and that does all the actual work. There is no actual scanner technology in TWAIN, each scanner comes with its own GUI plus scanner driver bolted into one app. So in TWAIN there is no API for like "Scan A4 document, 300dpi" only "Make whatever Twain GUI I have appear" and when you buy a scanner it just comes with a CD (I guess these days they tell you to download it probably? I have not set up a new scanner in decades) with the software on it. But SANE does what people assumed TWAIN did, the GUI application software is neutral, and the code for driving scanners has APIs for scanning documents, because that makes more sense (and also, frankly, "reverse engineering USB code" and "building easy to use GUIs" are not the same skill set). As a bonus it means you can network SANE, just by adding an RPC layer, whereas for TWAIN you'd need like RDP or something. Blergh.