Re: Interoperability of GCM?

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On 26 May 2010 19:54, Milan Knížek <knizek volny cz> wrote:
> since GCM is getting more into business of the central repository of ICC
> profiles for other applications, how does it stand from the viewpoint of
> interoperability between various desktop environments?

Well, GCM exposes a DBus interface that applications to use, rather
than a shared library like other CMS solutions have tried to do. Being
a DBus interface it means that applications written in any language
can access the interface at runtime, rather than build time. This also
means that if the interface is not available (either disabled, or just
not installed) then the application can fall back to defaults or
asking the user. It's like a soft run-time dep, rather than an
implicit hard build-time dep.

> If GCM is dependent on Gnome libs, I wonder if e.g. digiKam developers
> will be willing to implement support for GCM.

Sure, GCM does depend on a lot of GNOMEy stuff. That said, the core
access objects just depend on Glib (rather than GTK and random stuff
like libnotify) so it would be very easy to write a program to expose
the DBus interface without any of the other deps which applications
like digiKam could use. Glib is already part of the LSB so it'll be
installed on pretty much any system regardless of desktop environment.

Are you worried specifically about the interface name
(org.gnome.ColorManager) or the deps of the project (e.g. libnotify)
or are you just interested in discussion? :)

Richard