Package: libsane
Version: 1.1.1+git20220322-focal0
Severity: normal
Dear Maintainer,
* What led up to the situation?
I was testing a parallel port scanner in order to verify changes to the SANE
plustek_pp backend.
* What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
ineffective)?
I realised that although libieee1284-3-dev is a dependency of libsane and the
backends, the Debian package uses the --enable-parport-directio configure
option to disable libieee1284 support in favour of direct port interaction. I
suggest that libieeee1284 support is superior and in my testing I found it very
stable. We recently changed the sanei_pp support to remove direct port access
since it is not portable.
* What was the outcome of this action?
The parallel port scanners that I tested seemed to work adequately.
My suggestion would be to alter the package build to use libieee1284 support
instead.
Reasoning:
- Permissions are simpler, one need only to be a member of the lp group
- Devices names are more intuitive.
- We recently removed the kernel driver build option for the plustek_pp backend
since it now does not work, due to the changes mentioned above.
This is probably a fairly low priority issue, since I can hardly believe that
many people use parallel port scanners these days.
There has been some discussion on sane-devel here: https://alioth-
lists.debian.net/pipermail/sane-devel/2022-March/039417.html
The recent work on plustek_pp is discussed here: https://gitlab.com/sane-
project/backends/-/issues/578
Upstream merge request involving mods to the sanei_pp support layer:
https://gitlab.com/sane-project/backends/-/merge_requests/521
-- System Information:
Debian Release: bullseye/sid
APT prefers focal-updates
APT policy: (500, 'focal-updates'), (500, 'focal-security'), (500, 'focal'),
(100, 'focal-backports')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386
Kernel: Linux 5.4.0-100-generic (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_WARN, TAINT_OOT_MODULE,
TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_CA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8),
LANGUAGE=en_CA:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
Versions of packages libsane depends on:
ii libsane1 1.1.1+git20220322-focal0
libsane recommends no packages.
libsane suggests no packages.
