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

[Alexander Larsson]

On Thu, 2017-10-12 at 14:09 +0200, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> 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.

I think this is true, but it also makes packaging such apps much
harder, as you suddenly need to convince distros to change how sane is
packaged, no?

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
       alexl at redhat.com            alexander.larsson at gmail.com 
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