# Bit of a rant, bug in PNM

Nick Lamb (njl98r@ecs.soton.ac.uk)
Tue, 8 Dec 1998 20:33:12 +0000 (GMT)

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I'm running SANE 1.0 and the Gnomified front ends from CVS

This is a bit of a rant, because I've been a huge fan of SANE (as an idea)
without trying to implement it for real, and now I am disappointed :(

<rant>
1. The SANE web pages only list one or two scanners as supported for HP,
but of course the HP support extends to almost their whole range of SCSI
scanners. Either this page should tell users what is definitely working,
(which is almost nothing) or it should tell users what is expected to
work, given a little effort (which is quite a lot, really).

2. The PNM backend seems to be a quick hack, not really meant to be
distributed in v1.0 package. I hoped to use it to test my install of
SANE, but instead I have spent a good hour finding that the
problem initially thought to be the result of my mistakes is a BUG
in the PNM backend!
</rant>

The major bug in the PNM device is that it seems to think the
maximum length parameter to read_sane() is just a suggestion! If
the PNM device has more data to send, it just writes past the end
of the buffer, usually resulting in random SEGVs
It sets the return values correctly, but that's no comfort when
your other variables have been smashed :(

I can't tell if this bug exists for any other SANE devices.

Nick.

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