I have been using the --compression backend support in the fujitsu backend a lot and I am happy with it.
I use Fedora srpm:s and I have to patch the build so that sane.h enables compression support. With sane 1.0.21 this broke, the compression support no longer compiles if you enable it, so I have to downgrade to 1.0.20 which is a bit inconvenient. The compression support is really really useful for me and I do hope it doesnt get orphaned. -- Joakim Verona