"Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg at tristatelogic.com> writes: > In message <87fwi43zbq.fsf at avasys.jp>, > Olaf Meeuwissen <olaf.meeuwissen at avasys.jp> wrote: > >>WRT FreeBSD support, may I suggest you submit a support request[2] so we >>get concrete info on how badly people want this. > > I'm not sure that I understand your request. Could you elaborate?
Submit a support request saying you want to use your V500 scanner with FreeBSD but that the current iscan packages + interpreter package don't work. The decision makers don't read the mailing list. They do get an overview of the support requests we get. *You* have to put your issue on *their* radar. > I mean I want it. I want it bad. How bad? On a scale from one to ten? > Well, you know, I suppose that there are many things in this life that I > want more... youth, good looks, lots of money... ;-) > If you are thinking that many other people will suddenly arise from out of > the woodwork to clamor for a FreeBSD port of your driver, once I have formally > done so, well I seriously don't think that's realistic. It's clear that > FreeBSD doesn't have nearly the market penetration of Linux at this point, > so there is never going to be a numerically huge demand. But those of us > who use FreeBSD sure would think kindly of your company if you helped us > on on this. No, that's not what I'm thinking but if you don't get your issue on the radar of those who decide what get's done and what doesn't, it won't even be considered. > [...snip...] > > P.S. If you guys already have the code to make this work, then why not just > do a FreeBSD port and release it as "unsupported"? I cannot imagine that > doing that would take much work on your part. I mean it isn't as if Linux > and FreeBSD are such radically different environments. In fact they are > virtually identially in most respects. And also, as I understand it, access > to this typr of scanner on FreeBSD is now performed exclusively through a > low-level thing called "libusb" which is presenting some sort of nice clean > API to higher level code that wants to access USB devices. So if your code > already knows how to interface to libusb on Linux... well... I mean seriously, > how hard would it be to just recompile the stuff for FreeBSD and then just > stick the result on your FTP server under unsupported/ or something like that? > > Of course, if you are willing to do this I'll be more than happy to volunteer > to be the guinea pig and test the thing out for you and see if it even works. You might want to include this in your support request. Hope this helps, -- Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2 FLOSS Engineer -- AVASYS CORPORATION FSF Associate Member #1962 Help support software freedom http://www.fsf.org/jf?referrer=1962