It would be very helpful if there were an official PPA for SANE .debs. Ubuntu 9.04's use of libsane-1.0.19-23ubuntu7 would probably bring a substantial influx of willing testers with hardware, if there was an easy way to track 1.0.20 releases with an entry under sources.list.d.
Could the git snapshot machinery be extended to build .debs? http://www.sane-project.org/snapshots/ Thanks, Jeff