Re: Interoperability of GCM?

[Milan Knížek <knizek confy volny cz>]

Richard Hughes píše v St 26. 05. 2010 v 23:16 +0100:
> 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.
> 
Okay, thanks for info.

> > 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? :)

On many other forums, there is a lot of flame wars about
KDE/GNOME/whatever by both users and developers and hence I assume that
proposing to digiKam developers to add a DBus interface to a GNOME
application could result in unnecessary refusal or at least a heated
discussion.

I personally do not care much and rather try to use applications which
fulfil my needs. Having a standardise interface (open file dialog, etc)
would be a benefit, but Linux is not there yet.

I assume that a politically feasible way for digiKam would be to have a
KDE GUI (equivalent to GCM GUI) above the core access objects, and
org.gnome.SomeThing might make it a bit more difficult.

Anyway, I guess we (users) will have to wait some time until it gets
standardised and things will then settle themselves. The worst solution
would be to have GCM and "KCM" running at the same moment and fighting
for screen calibration...

P.S. I have briefly read the OpenICC mailing list discussion recently.

Best regards,

Milan Knizek
knizek (dot) confy (at) volny (dot) cz
http://www.milan-knizek.net - About linux and photography (Czech
language only)