Replace XSane with Simple-Scan

[Douglas R. Reno]

It seems that Upstream has stopped working on XSane, per Debian.

xsane (0.999-6) unstable; urgency=medium

  - Upstream has stopped working on xsane. Many thanks to Oliver Rauch for
    your work.

The XSane domain is now unavailable as well. It's been moved to GitLab as of this year, but no development in 6 years.

​https://gitlab.com/sane-project/frontend/xsane

I think we should replace this with GNOME's Simple Scan. It'll have to be upgraded at new minor versions (next is 3.34 in September) like any GNOME program, but it should be cleaner and work better with what we have.

[Bruce Dubbs]

I've been using xsane for quite a while, but not frequently. For my modest needs it still works fine. We need to see what the overhead is for simple scan and what its features are like.

[Douglas R. Reno]

Don't let this clog up 9.0's ticket cycle... I'll investigate for 9.1 assuming we don't finish tagging early.

[Tim Tassonis]

I had a look at it quickly, and it does not look too good for non-gnome users:

• It builds and installs fine with meson/ninja, it asks about packagekit-glib2, but is fine without it.

• It installs tons of help pages with the ending .help, which is some xml format, probably once useful in some gnome reader.

• It cannot be integrated into gimp

• When calling it, it asks for a device, while xsane auto-detects my HP Printer Scanner on my network.

So, in short: I cannot scan images with simple-scan, and have a fairly regular setup, with a hplip supported HP Printer/Scanner, that works perfectly fine with xsane. All I get from xsane is:

Trace/breakpoint trap

It's probably only useful for usb-attached devices, which is not really what people do.

So, I'm strongly advocating against dropping xsane and including simple-scan, simply because xscan works and simple-scan does not.

[Douglas R. Reno]

XSane is now actively maintained again at ​https://gitlab.com/sane-project/frontend/xsane , and factoring Tim mentioned above in, let's re-examine this when XSane becomes version 1.0. I'm going to close this for now.

We might want to make a upstream fixes patch though, there have been some very nice improvements (like the removal of the license screen on every startup).