Flatpaking of Paperwork: Issues with locale-specific files and scanner drivers

[Bastien Nocera]

On Thu, 2017-10-12 at 13:45 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 
<snip>1
> > - Paperwork uses Sane to access scanners. However, Sane only has
> > user-land drivers (most uses libusb I guess). Most users don't have
> > saned (Sane daemon) enabled on their system. Therefore, libsane
> > usually access directly the scanner(s) using the user-land drivers
> > bundled with it. I can easily package all the open-source drivers
> > of
> > sane-backends with Paperwork, but some people have scanners
> > requiring
> > proprietary drivers. For instance, my Brother scanner is installed
> > using a shell script provided by Brother, and this shell script
> > download and install .deb files.
> 
> You can make an app extension point for this, then people can package
> drivers either as flatpaks, or by using "unmanaged extensions" which
> are just a correctly named directory on the host acting as an
> extension.

We still need to think of a way to handle "generic" USB devices. I
think that using saned in the same way we use PulseAudio, Pipewire and
co. (authorisation agent) would probably be the best way to solve the
problem for Flatpak.

It's quite a bit of work, but that's pretty much the only way to get
hotplug support, remote device discovery, all handled in a way that'd
integrate well with Flatpak.

I don't think that each scanning application having its own SANE stack
is a good way to solve that problem.