[Openicc] Helping with colord

[Kai-Uwe Behrmann]

Am 07.03.2011 14:15, schrieb Andrzej Nowicki:
> On 7 March 2011 13:00, Graeme Gill <graeme at argyllcms.com> wrote:
>> Andrzej Nowicki wrote:
>>> 1.    Oyranos had a poor chance of being picked up by distributions
>> Are there specific reasons you came to that conclusion ?
> Specific reasons were:
>
> 1.    No reason for distributions to include oyranos by default as
> there were no apps demanding it

Fedora has Oyranos packaged for CinePaint.

> 2.    Dependencies of oyranos are not already included by default

This is addressed by including the needed bits into the Oyranos package
itself.
There are no special external packages needed any more. Of course lcms,
CUPS, SANE and Xorg are required to to build the according device modules.

[Elektra appears to make its way into linux distributions nevertheless.]

> 3.    An over-complicated codebase with it's own object system

Oyranos is designed from the needs of high end imaging coupled with the
needs of non expert uses. That task is not done with a small system daemon.

A own object system is needed in C. I know of no stand alone C project
which uses a external object system. Either they avoid a object oriented
design or do their own object system.

C++ would have been cool especially paired with boost. But C++ would
have serious disadvantages for basic and highly portable libraries
because of missing API stability.

> Other reasons exist.

If you concluded that from the comparison on the colord/GCM web side,
thats no surprise. However Richards CMS comparison page is full of wrong
statements about all but own projects. Personally I consider most of
these statements nonobjective. Some of the "criticism" points have two
errors inside, and most are wrong or at least incorrect.

[A undoubtedly valuable CMS for Linux like ArgyllCMS is not even
included in the comparison. ArgyllCMS is just minimal mentioned in
relation to the GCM profiler.]

>>> 2.    Oyranos had no dbus interfaces (we use dbus many times in our
>>> research projects)
>> Perhaps a dbus interface could be added to Oyranos ?
> I remember the author disliking dbus in public.

I have not much a opinion about DBus. But as a basic building block for
a cross platform open source colour management system it appears out of
scope.

Further I heavily suspect that DBus is misused in colord as a
replacement for proper integration in existing CMS mechanisms like PDF
or CUPS' PPD and Xorg's atoms.

As a convenient layer to talk to a local instance of a CMS, DBus might
be as good as any command line tool or C library interface. On top of a
modular designed CMS, as Oyranos is, no problem.

>> Perhaps someone could write python interface code ?
> Yes, this is one thing we talked about.
>
>> I would hope that any software that has merit would have a chance of
>> being included in distributions, although a software ecosystem that
>> depends on distribution "king makers" is a poor one in my view.
> I am not sure of the term "king makers", sorry.

> Many thanks,
>
> Andrzej NOWICKI

thanks for your comments and kind regards,
Kai-Uwe Behrmann