[Openicc] Fedora CM, was: Google Summer of Code . . .

[Chris Murphy]

On May 19, 2010, at 2:53 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

> On 5/19/10, Chris Murphy wrote:
>> 
>> I don't understand the distinction, or the example.
> 
> Ah, right -- you are coming with Mac background.
> 
> Linux has different desktop environments, each of them having its own
> set of basic and advanced applications (PIM, document/image viewers,
> file manager and so on). They also use different UI toolkits and,
> mostly, different APIs. You can have several desktop environments
> installed on your system simultaneously and even use applications from
> one desktop environment in the other environment. GNOME Color Manager
> relies on some APIs from GNOME desktop environment (gnome.org).
> 
> Desktop environments are not written by one single company that does a
> particular distribution. This is an open work, so e.g. both Redhat
> (Fedora) and Canonical (Ubuntu),as  well as smaller companies and
> (lots and lots of) individuals  contribute to development GNOME.
> 
> Now, a distribution is just a bundle of easily installed applications
> that covers needs of a user that creator of that distribution had in
> mind. It can contain applications that are written for GNOME and/or
> for KDE (kde.org) or not written for any particular desktop
> environment at all (like OpenOffice.org and Firefox).

OK good. Thanks.

Then it seems like the KDE folks and the GNOME folks should be talking about this very basic color management framework so that they, and those writing applications using their desktop environments, don't have to re-invent the wheel every time they want to implement basic color management functionality. I can understand KDE and GNOME may have different higher level features for color managed applications or printing, but unless the KDE people could care less about color management at all, a consistent means of creating, setting and discovering display profiles is a major benefit for all developers and users who are interested in color management. 

Even if KDE or GNOME decide apps shouldn't need to know what the display profile is, the window server or some agent of it needs to in order to fully color manage ever pixel on the display on behalf of all applications. Very clearly display technologies are diverging from sRGB, not converging on it as was once the case. Assuming the same color space for everything appearing on the display just does not work well at all, and increasingly is problematic even for basic users wanting to using a web browser.

Chris Murphy