Future of libksane

[Kåre Särs]

For almost a decade I have been thinking about splitting the UI and business-logic in 
libksane, to make it possible to use without the QWidget. I started twice but never 
gathered enough inspiration to get it done all the way. Luckily, about a year ago Alexander 
Stippich stepped up to work on Skanpage and has now also almost finished the split I was 
thinking of. He has taken over Skanpage (the multi-page paper-document scanning 
application) and has done a great job with improvements to Skanpage, Skanlite and 
libksane.

Our almost done plan: 
The core parts of libksane are split out into a non-UI library called KSaneCore (this is 
already done but all still in the libksane repository). The current QWidget API would remain 
in the libksane repository, but the new dependency KSaneCore would move to a separate 
repository.

With the move to Qt6 and KF6, libksane would be renamed to KSaneWidget to better 
reflect what it provides.


Now to our questions/problems:

There was some problem with pushing the whole history of libksane to the KSaneCore 
repository at one point, because of some author email issues in some old commit and now 
that we asked for KDE Gear inclusion, force pushing no-longer works. I guess this is just a 
mater of filing a sysadmin ticket to get the whole libksane history force-pushed to the 
KSaneCore repository (nobody is using the repository yet).

These two libraries are KDE-internally used by at least Skanlite, Skanpage (only 
KSaneCore) and DigiKam. There are also a couple of unofficial KDE projects that use 
libksane. KDE-external usage I do not know about, but I suspect there might be ;)
 
At the time of porting to KF5, I did not pursue Frameworks integration, because I wanted 
this split to be done first. Now that the split is (almost) done I'm wondering if it would be a 
good time/idea to turn them into KDE Frameworks libraries?

Best regards,
  Kåre

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