[Openicc] Helping with colord

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

On 3/8/11, Kai-Uwe Behrmann wrote:

>> The facts are that:
>
> Facts and merely belittling is for me quite different.

Ah, so you are taking defensive stance instead of listening for one
minute. How very predictable.

>> - there have been no new source code tarballs in *years*
>> - you are the only developer who barely touches that source code, as
>> far as I can tell
>
> Thats correct from what I could see. And thats why CinePaint has unique
> features and robustness, which other comparable applications still do
> not provide.

Er, what? The fact that the project barely evolves makes it unique and robust?

>> [1] No - neither Oyranos, nor UFRaw integration, nor unusable (by mere
>> mortals) HDR merge count as such.
>
> CinePaint is colour management wise one of the most mature open
> source applications outside the PDF world.

Yes

> When it comes to printing photographs, I know only two open source
> graphical applications providing satisfying results to my quality
> requirements - PhotoPrint and CinePaint.

Yes

> I use CinePaint all the time to compare to other applications and to
> cross check Oyranos.

Is it your only use of Cinepaint? Cross-checking? No real work done?

> That there are so few patches with real changes
> means to me only one thing: Many colour management bugs are simply fixed
> and most of them before I left the project, because Oyranos was
> decidedly not required for ubuntu.

So your statement would be that Cinepaint is feature complete?

Bloody hellfire, all those smart kids sending their papers to SIGGRAPH
every year and gettings contracts in the industry are wasting their
time, because everything is already invented. </sarcasm>

> In fact you are strongly belittling one of the few reference
> applications in the area of GUI driven linux colour management.

I do not belittle anything. In case of emergency I'd give a kidney to
the guy who would create a state of the art image editing tool for
Linux. But no free tool is there, and *some* don't even make an
effort.

> What is your contribution to linux colour management? What is your
> technical expertise in colour management? You judge on exactly
> what base?

Would you mind quitting hysterics?

>>>> http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/detail.php?group_id=75029&ugn=cinepaint&type=cvs&mode=12months
>>> What about the 3000 downloads per month(?):
>
>> What about them? Who are these 3000 people? Did they know they would
>> get 32bpc and basic color management on top of terribly outdated GIMP
>> 1.2 feature set? Or did they read somewhere that this is what
>
> They get stable colour management.

That doesn't answer the question. Who are these people? I know just
few actual Cinepaint users who use it for very simple edits (because
Cinepaint has limited feature set) when they need >8bpc precision.

Stable color management is great. And then what? Cinepaint is behind
the times in every single other aspect, from UI to feature set, and
you are not even admitting it.

>> professionals at Hollywood use and thus expected something on par with
>> Photoshop? I don't know -- you tell me :)
>
> Come one, you do not really want to make this old fan boy fairy tail
> continue? Similar perception problems exist with other projects likewise.

Fan boy? Hm. No, can't see that. Care to elaborate?

>>> As well:
>>> http://www.oyranos.org/scm?p=cinepaint.git;a=summary
>> That's exactly what I've been talking about for whole last year: lack
>> of communication to users. How are people supposed to know? The
>
> I want to place again my cut off answer to your above question:

>>> The last patch dates from this year. Btw. many of those patches went
>>> into Fedora.
>
> Obviously I am not in the marketing team of CinePaint.

The *what* team? Cinepaint has a team? Where?

>> ubermanager Robin Rowe presumably has no idea of your Git repo,
>> because back in November he wrote, and I quote, "The CinePaint project
>> and source code continue to be hosted at SourceForge". Or maybe he
>> doesn't care to update. Or maybe he thinks communication is not
>> important, but then what is?
>
> Thats something to ask Robin not me.

So you don't even interact?

>> I can't even see how often commits go into the Git tree without
>> cloning the repo, because both RSS feeds tell me there are no entries.
>
> Use better tools for a quick overview of code projects. I doubt you
> wanted to analyse.

Yeah, as soon as I'm near any broadband connection, I'll git clone,
but so far there is no way I can see that. The brain-damaged web
interface doesn't even let me view the complete log. I doubt you ever
tried that web UI. Well, *I* did :)

>> Seriously, what conclusions do you expect people to make?
>
> That they do not stretch facts like you do here in order to decidedly
> draw wrong conclusions.

And which conclusion is wrong exactly?

That there have been no new features apart from those aforementioned?
That there is little to no work done to bring Cinepaint to state of the art?
That nobody makes an effort to communicate to users?
That there have been no releases in years, and thus all patches since
then are not easily available?

The only thing I keep hearing from the project in *years* is "We are
not dead, no really, serious!". We've been here before with elektra
discussion. I'll say it once again: if a project doesn't make an
effort releasing and comunicating to its user base what it's up to, it
doesn't really matter if it's really alive, because nobody cares.

Kai-Uwe, you fail to understand one very simple thing. This is not
about belittling or "your tool vs. my tool". It's about bloody
delivering. If you are in software business, you've got to deliver to
people.

Cinepaint? Not updated in years, not communicating to users, not used
(comparatively).
Oyranos? Not used in any software project any distribution relies on.
Kolor Manager? Never made part of KDE, nor integrated into digiKam as
planned. Instead a new project is started.

And you know why? While having created a nice architecture (I did my
bit iof pluggin trying to get Scribus developers use Oyranos in the
past), you made a number of utterly wrong design decisions, from UI
toolkit to configuration system, and now you *suddenly* discover that
desktops don't want it. Well, guess what -- you are not in position to
tell desktops what technologies to use. *You* plug into
infrastructure, not vice versa.

Having stamina for a long run is simply not enough. Having nice
architecture is not enough either. The only way to stop people
wondering if a project is dead or alive is to arrange matters so that
no sane person would ever have reasons to doubt. Of course if you
prefer getting architectural on people instead, it's entirely up to
you.

Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org