[Openicc] Profile installation and association for Linux/Unix/X11

[Hal V. Engel]

On Sunday 20 April 2008 08:58:12 Graeme Gill wrote:
> I've been working on the installation details for display ICC profiles
> on various operating systems, and was wondering if there is any
> consensus with regard to Linux & X11.
>
> The profiles stored in the root window _ICC_PROFILE property (and the
> parallel one that I store in the XrandR 1.2 output property) will like all
> properties be volatile, lasting only as long as the X server, and hence
> will need re-loading every time the X11 server starts. It would be good to
> have a convention as to where installed profiles live, and what device
> they are associated with.
>
> Location for storing profiles that I'm aware of are:
>
> 	/usr/share/color/icc
> 	/usr/local/share/color/icc
> 	~/.color/icc
> 	/usr/local/share/Scribus/profiles
>
> Are there any others ?
> Is there any consensus on the preferred location ?
>
> Is there any convention as to how the information is stored
> as to a particular profiles association with a device ?
>
> Without such a convention, it's not really possible to setup a general
> mechanism to ensure that the display root window properties are
> set correctly, or that the display calibration is initialized properly.
>
> Of course it would be easy enough to invent a simple text file
> format that lives in the color directory to map profile names
> to a device name, 

Of course this is not how things are done in *nix systems.  This type of 
configuration file should live in /etc and/or ~/.color/icc (? is this correct 
for a user config file?) like all other configuration files.  

This issue, IE. having a persistant device to profile configuration store, is 
one of the things that Oryanos is designed to address and at some point there 
needs to an accepted convention for how this configuration information is 
stored and managed.  In addition, there needs to be things like a user level 
UI that would have functionality similar to the Windows Color Control Panel 
Applet.  

One of the OpenICC Google Summer of Code 2008 project proposals is to 
implement this for KDE4 and to leverage Oryanos for the underlaying 
functionality.  We will not know until tomorrow how many slots OpenICC will 
have for GSoC 2008 but currently this project has the highest rank of all of 
the proposals and is very likely (in fact almost certain) to be one of this 
years projects.  

Because this project has the potential to make system wide CM configuration 
into a very visible part of the KDE desktop I think this project is very 
important and could (in fact should) help establish many of the standards 
related to CM configuration on X11 systems.  I expect that the student who 
will be working on this will be working with the project mentors and this 
list to nail down the design between now and late May when formal coding 
starts and this will be our opportunity to work out many of these details. 

Hal

> that will work with my particular toolset if 
> there is no particular convention to be followed.
>
> Graeme Gill.
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