[Openicc] Helping with colord

[Richard Hughes]

On 6 March 2011 21:36, Andrzej Nowicki <andrzej.nowicki80 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1.   Is colord community receptive to additional members and outside help or
> is an individual project?

As Graeme said, the "colord" community is basically just one developer
at the moment: me. That said, I would welcome additional developers
with open arms.

> 2.   As colord is obsoleting oyranos will there be any integration work
> alongside other such softwares?

... colord isn't actually trying to obsolete Oyranos -- we're doing a
lot of the same things as Oyranos but I think we're also doing them in
quite a different way. As for integration work, I've considered
importing settings from argyllcms (the ucmm format) and also importing
settings from Oyranos (libelektra) but decided that for the number of
people with existing ucmm or elektra configurations didn't justify the
additional deps. If you're referring to Ookala MCF then I'm pretty
sure that's a dead project, with only a handful of users.

> 3.   Would financial backing of colord be permitted?

Kinda a tricky question. I work for Red Hat, and so I'm unable to take
additional pay for extra work outside of my usual work with Red Hat,
and to be brutally honest, I'm not sure what the extra money would
allow me to do. What would be waaay more useful at this stage is for
someone to sit down (or pay a developer to sit down) and do things
like add color management support to to projects like clutter which
could be used by lots and lots of projects, and benefit more than just
colord.

> 4.   We are using Ubuntu and are compiling locally here. When will .deb
> packages be available for Ubuntu?

I'm using Fedora (obviously :-) but I'm hopeful someone will do colord
packages for the GNOME 3 release. GNOME 3.2 is going to depend on
colord explicitly, and so by then it's going to be a hard requirement
of distros shipping GNOME. If you want to spend some time to get
packages into Debian I'm sure that would be time well spent.

> 5.   What is planned after display, scanner and printing support?
> Calibration devices?

Lots of questions! I guess you're referring to calibration devices
like the huey and colormunki. I think those drivers still belong in
the session (i.e. argyllcms and gnome-color-manager) as I don't see
any benefit to being able to use them in the system layer. I'm open to
discussion about that tho, if you have a compelling use case.

> 6.   Are any developers near Poland? I would very much like to invite a
> developer to talk about colord.

As Alexandre said, I'm based in London. I can't really ask Red Hat to
fund travel expenses for random visits, but if you're organizing a
conference or something let me know and I can ask. I probably know
about 10 words in Polish, and so I'd have to speak in English. :-)

> 7.   Can profiles have more than one selectors? Is it expected the control
> panel adds selectors to existing profiles?

At the moment, a profile can have just one selector (I called them
"qualifiers", although I think ColorSync refers to them as selectors)
but this is a soft requirement. I guess you're asking so you can have
one custom ICC profile for Matte paper, the same profile for Glossy
paper, and a different profile for Plain paper. I'm not sure if that's
sane (you probably want either all different profiles for the
different types, or one "middle of the road" profile for all of them)
from a use case point of view, but it's probably something we don't
want to explicitly prevent. I'm open to ideas.

As for changing the qualifiers, I did think "power users" would be
using the colorgui graphical tool shipped with colord for such
changes. I suppose putting the UI in gnome-color-manager would also
work, but I really want to keep GCM a high-level interface. Again, I'm
open for ideas.

> 8.   I see no mailing list for colord, but have read many posts on this list
> archives. Ideas?

Yup, I'm currently using the gnome-color-manager mailing list, which
perhaps isn't the wisest of moves (as colord isn't GNOME specific) but
I can create a mailing list if demand suffices.

> Many thanks for the answers, colord is very exciting to us.

No problem, thanks for the interest.

Richard.