Glimpse in kdereview

[Jonathan Marten]

John Layt <johnlayt at yahoo.com.au> writes:
> 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?

Speaking as the adoptive maintainer of Kooka and libkscan, as we know
the former has been removed from kdegraphics in KDE4 and libkscan
there is essentially unchanged from KDE3.  Eventually either kooka or
Glimpse may reappear in kdegraphics, but that will be a long journey.
kooka and updated libkscan are currently in a working branch
(branches/work/kooka-kde3).

At the moment I'm mainly working on improving the functions and user
interface of the kooka application.  This has necessarily lead to some
changes in libkscan: with great care it may have been possible to keep
this library BC or at least source compatible, but in the interests of
cleaning up the code and API (improving maintainability in the future)
I decided not to have that as a high priority.  So it is likely that,
if libkscan in kdegraphics is updated, it will have to happen at a
major release.  I intend to port to KDE4 as soon as that becomes
usable for my day-to-day desktop...

It would be good if there was only one of libkscan and libksane, but
without looking at each of those libraries and the applications that
use them it's not possible to say if that could happen.  I would
certainly be willing to investigate libksane, once Glimpse is stable,
to see if Kooka could use that instead.

There is no OCR (or printing, or saving) support in libkscan at the
moment - all of that is handled by the Kooka application.

Regards, Jonathan

-- 
Jonathan Marten                         http://www.keelhaul.demon.co.uk
Twickenham, UK                          jjm2 at keelhaul.demon.co.uk