Glimpse in kdereview

[Allen Winter]

On Saturday 29 March 2008 09:31:06 Jonathan Marten wrote:
> 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.
>

I think all this is something that needs to be worked out within
the kdegraphics module folks and your coordinator (Aaron).

Speaking from a Release Team perspective... certainly we
don't want two libraries with similar functionality, if that
can be avoided.  But we also want/need a scanning capability
within the KDE main modules.