I’m pretty busy with scouting and other stuff. Also vala seems not yet able to handle subnamespace and that break mixing C/GObject and vala (can’t call C/GObject code from Vala). This is pain.

All these issues leads me to idle GNOME Scan for this summer. I’m quite disappointed because i don’t have time but i’m actually willing to get GNOME Scan included. I’m leaving the university and thus i’m searching a job. Next year, i don’t want to move out of Paris, but i actually want to work on GNOME and especially GNOME Scan. I may do a call for a job later.

Regards,

Étienne.

Next version of GNOME Scan will be 0.8, not 2.24. This show that GNOME Scan won’t be part of GNOME 2.24. A lot of you wonder why, and that’s a good question.

GNOME Scan still immature. 0.8 will see a lot of API breaks. GNOME Scan also depends on GEGL, a far from stable project which is actively developed by Øyvind Kolas and a lot of other people. SANE support is still incomplete. Some images data are misprocessed, sheetfed and cardreader are not supposed to work properly nor webcam.

Including GNOME Scan in GNOME plateform and flegita in GNOME desktop is not as simple as distributing it by default in your favorite distribution. This mean that we add GEGL as an external dependency, which i guess Øyvind would not like seems it imply supporting obsolete version. It also mean that GNOME Scan API must be stable enough accross version which i actually can’t assure yet.

However, not being included in GNOME doesn’t forbid your favorite distro to include it, neither your software to have a plugin using it.

All in one sentences : “Don’t include alpha project in GNOME desktop”.

Now, please tell me if i’m wrong

Regards,

Étienne.

I’m not good at following GNOME schedule. I do everything one or two month later :). I just started diving back in the development. I started by providing GEGL vala binding, without exactly knowing whether i will actually need it for GNOME Scan 0.8. Anyway, i activated vala in GNOME Scan build system. How long before automake support vala ?

I bumped version to 0.7.0 and will work on GNOME Scan. However, i have tons of things to do aside GNOME Scan : exams, scouting, drive permit, etc. I wish i’ll have the time to develop GNOME Scan before the freezes. Contributions are very welcome. However, GNOME Scan 0.8 needs some rework that can’t be done by a usual contributor. For sure, vala will speed up GNOME Scan development.

A good news, the windfarm_pm121 driver i wrote for iMac G5 iSight has been merged in Linus Torvald own tree I’m now one of the thousands contributors to linux kernel ! Thanks Benjamin Herrenschmidt for allowing this to happen.

This and GNOME Scan tells me that developing free software is actually what i want to do. This is why i submitted my CV to o-hand for their job offer for junion kernel developer and junior GUI developer. I know i can’t move on London next year, but working with a senior developer on free software is actually what i want to do for my firsts years of work after the university.

Regards,

Étienne.

Thanks to Antoine JACOUTOT, GNOME Scan has now an official port in OpenBSD.

Étienne.

Many thanks to Frederic Peters, GNOME Scan ref doc is now at library.gnome.org :  http://library.gnome.org/devel/gnome-scan/0.6/. If you fill adventurous, you could try writing a plugin for you prefered app or write a standalone app on top of GNOME Scan. Beware that API is supposed to change for 0.8, in order to provide bindings (Gobject introspection and vala first, then python and more).

Regards,

Étienne.

Sometime, SANE is actually going to make me cry. Today, i posted opened three discusions at sane-devel. I finished the work on hal-scanner, a proof of concept for HAL scanner support. In order to be clearer, i splitted all i had to say in three discussion. Let me review each of them.

HAL and scanners

This is a long standing issue. SANE, in order to be portable, integrates very bad with guest host device handling. HAL handle properly storage, camera and webcam but not scanner. A key point is to either pass an UDI to SANE or compute a SANE device name in order to open the device in SANE. SANE device name is a bit like v4l://0 device name you might have seen for webcam.

Obviously SANE people are completely ignorant of HAL. HAL is used in distros since 2004 or so. As usual, SANE people are very conservative. I wish this discussion will lead to a better solution than the current hack in hal-scanner to compute device name.

HAL scanner addon

Then, i announced my work on HAL scanner addon. I should have added “Announcement” to the title. Anyway, some people took it as an attack to impose some piece of code in the project. I even wonder if they opened the source tarball.

Well known sensors

In SANE, sensors are option and have three fields : the name (an untranslated string, like an identifier), a title (short string translated) and a desc (long translated description of the option).  Currently, some backends use “button 0″, “button 1″, etc. as name. This is pretty useless unless asking user to configure manually each sensor … The worst use case is when your grand ma push the cancel scan and just get a popup : “What do you want to do when pressing ‘button 3′?”. In GNOME, i want to make it just work.

This is why i proposed to have common semantic accross backend. I propose to have commone “email”, “print”, “scan”, “cancel”,”adf-opened”, “paper-in” and “auto” buttons. I also suggest to use boolean type for push button rather than integer. Prefixing name with “button-” or “sensor-” might help.

Conclusion

Sadly, SANE people want absolutely the user to configure each action, like KScannerButton does. I’m completely convinced that SANE is actually designed with backend developer point of view only. See this quote:

the button should be called something as close as possible to the
writing on the scanner, not the front-end authors list of words he
understands. there is no ‘email’ button on a fujitsu, there is a ‘Send
to’ button.[…]
then, you dont need to interpret the values, you only need to ask the
user- what do you want to do when ‘Send to button’ is pressed?

I completely disagree with the last part. We at GNOME are in war against popup (see Evolution 2.22),  against useless question, against confusing UI. Scanner library goal is to provide a device independant access to scanner in order GUI to provide smart behaviour and ergonomic GUI and, again, make things just work.

All in all, sane-devel discussion are always at the border-line of becoming a flamewar. Each part don’t want to understand others point of view. Allan Noah from SANE had a good view of the situation with SANE :

[LSB people] are so used to thinking about their application,
that they forget to do a sales pitch with people outside their group.
i think we SANE devels suffer from the same problem.

Allan Noah is really a nice guy. fujitsu backend is well written. But he is very conservative and strangely didn’t link my request to its current fujistu implementation. fujitsu backend already have semantic button ! And a lot lot of buttons ! A paradise of buttons ! Exactly what i asked for. That’s sad to see one of the best SANE developer forgetting to understand frontend point of view not as in KDE, but as in GNOME.

Anyway, HAL scanner support is becoming more than a proof of concept. There are still tons of area for improvments in GNOME Scan itself, OCR, image processing and more. Just that damn inconsistency in SANE backends make me sad.

Regards,
Étienne.

Finally, i got GNOME Scan 0.6 ready and sync with GNOME 2.22. This release is a big milestone. Let me expose you all the changes since 0.4.

• Completely redesigned and rewritten
• Modularize all the acquisition pipeline from the scanner to the sink.
• Dynamic pipeline plugins parameter list exposed to the UI
• Based on GEGL for huge sized image handling and much much more
• multi thread anywhere : probing, acquisition and more
• acquisition from images
• automatic per application scan settings saving in GConf
• optionnal automatic color enhancement
• available in 15 languages
• Streamlined GUI for mass acquisition
• extended SANE driver support and workarounds
• Regression: no PDF nor JPEG saving

Please make a big welcome to this milestone, ask your distro to publish it along GNOME 2.22 and report ideas, bugs and more for the future.

• http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnome-scan/0.6
  
• Available in my PPA for gutsy and hardy.

As 0.6 says, the road is long before 1.0 which will be hopefully synced with GNOME version number. Amongs other things here are the plans for the future:

• Consolidate code and API. This is important before producing bindings, tutorial, etc. for wider adoption from developers.
  • Split dialog code for better reusability
  • Review preview UI management
  • improve option handling, especially for high level option like PaperSize, etc.
  • Improve device handling: status/error reporting, opening in seperate thread, etc.
• Merge scan dialog and acquisition dialog, allow to configure next scan without relaunching dialog
• Use hal scanner API and hotplug smoothness as well as signal monitoring
• Fully migrate to GeglOperation, this avoid us to split the progress bar in 3 stage.
• Support sheet-fed scanners, webcam, etc.
• PDF, jpeg, printing and more for flegita.

I started some weeks ago the work on hal-scanner. It’s going well, i’ll submit it to HAL and take it in account as soon as possible in gnome-scan. Packages will always be in my PPA.

Don’t hesitate to report well commented bug for GNOME Scan . You know i really want to finally fix this big whole in GNOME and desktops in general about scanning. Your use case, your ideas, your hardware specific behaviour/feature interest me a lot. Reporting all that in bugzilla allow me to have a high view of all the neds and design properly for most uses. Thanks

Regards,

Étienne.

I’m very happy with feedback from 0.5.93 release. I merged 3 patches from Ross Burton and got translation updates. I decide to provide a new RC release due to the big amout of bug fixes this release has :

• Migrate to new GTK+ tooltip API. Depends on GTK+ 2.12
• Added blurb for PNG compression level option in flegita.
• Translate application name in about flegita dialog.
• Focus Forward button in GnomeScanAcquisitionDialog.
• Fixed hidden option exposed in UI (bug #519331).
• Don’t depends on libgnome and libgnomeui, thanks to Ross Burton (bug #519344). Fixed untranslated application name.
• Don’t version modules, thanks to Ross Burton (bug #519350).
• Cleaned up build system, thanks to Ross Burton.
• Fixed GSFile backend not updated for a while. Migrated to GEGL 0.0.16, etc.
• Use explicit gettext domain in library rather than using application defined one.

Updated translation from Jorge González (es), Étienne Bersac (fr) and Daniel Nylander (sv)

Sources are in GNOME FTP, Packages are available in my PPA. I may provide 0.5.95 monday march the 3rd and will release 0.6 monday march the 10th as promised. Please report bugs and translate

Étienne.

I’m very pleased to announce the availability of Gnome Scan 0.5.93. It’s a very good release, it’s not 0.6 only because i want to wait until hard code freeze in order to get more translation, and feedback. This annoucement include 0.5.92 version which was released monday.

• Clean preview handling allowing to use hardware capability
• Manual page orientation handling
• Use 75.dpi as hardcoded resolution, this is more common accross backend.
• Accurate preview area ROI selection using real rather than integer.
• Fixed preview acquisition progress bar not shown (regression).
• Fix lots of ref/unref leaks both GeglBuffer and widgets
• Automatic per app option saving in GConf
• Automatic color enhancement.
• Use a waiting cursor if probing in background.
• Dropped buggy printing in flegita.
• About dialog is back.
• Depends on GEGL 0.0.16 (this won’t change until 0.7.1).
• Reworked and completed documentation, needs some tutorial, but API is not stable enough for that.

Without color enhancement

With color enhancement enabled

As you can see, there is tons of bug fixes, 0.5.9X are really beta version, even if the API and internal code are meant to change in the future, i wanted to get a stable version enough for production. Please test it and translate it !

• Gnome Scan sources tarball
• Gnome Scan Ubuntu gutsy debs
• Report bug
• Translation statistics
  

SVN has new tooltip API and minor changes. I plan only to document that all, fill bugs for next version and plan the future. 0.6 will be in time for Gnome 2.22

Regards,
Étienne.

Gnome Scan hit revision 500 with a brand new feature : automatic per app settings saving in GConf. To get this properly done, i had to hunt ref/unref bug (r499). This mean that gnome-scan is cleaner while having one more feature.

Options are stored as /apps/gnome-scan/%app%/%option% . I’m wondering which key would be better. If ever you have an idea, check out the discussion at desktop-devel-list and post your answer. I may write schemas to gconf, but that’s pretty useless. I could also use this feature to store window size and position, and add further behaviour that need to be disablable like a popup notifying user to remove their sheet back from the flatbed scanner, etc.

I hope to provide 0.5.92 tomorow along Gnome 2.21.92.

Regards,
Étienne.