Glimpse in kdereview

[John Layt]

On Thursday 27 March 2008, Kåre Särs wrote:

> > On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 2:55 PM, Kåre Särs <kare.sars at kolumbus.fi> wrote:

> > >  Glimpse is a simple scan application that only scans and saves images
> > > (no OCR). Glimpse uses libksane from extragears (not libkscan).

> extragears/graphics or kdegraphics (kdegraphics would mean that libksane
> would have to move to).

I don't know what the kdegraphics policies are, but I want to raise the 
question of whether we should have two libraries in kdegraphics performing 
exactly the same function, especially when libkscan is apparently being 
worked on again (but not in trunk?).

While I appreciate that libkscan was unmaintained when you started and may not 
have met your or Digikam's needs (and your work is certainly appreciated), 
I'm reluctant to see a situation arise where we are supporting two competing 
libraries without a clear idea of where we are heading.  True, this is 
kdegraphics and not kdelibs, so the policy is more liberal, but by providing 
both these as libraries for developers to use we're surely making some 
promises around them with regards to ongoing support and stability?

Perhaps you can give us a better overview of the differences between libksane 
and libkscan and why we should have both in kdegraphics?  What are the future 
plans for libksane?  Do you see libksane eventually replacing a deprecated 
libkscan with advanced features like OCR left to apps to implement?

Note I have no objections to Glimpse itself, the split between simple and 
advanced scan apps makes sense to me, it's the libraries I have concerns 
about.

Cheers!

John.

P.S. While we're on the issue, how is scanning currently being supported under 
Windows and OSX?  If we had a library that was cross-platform by using the 
native Win/OSX dialogs/drivers like QPrintDialog does, then it could be a 
candidate for kdelibs?

--

Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com