Argyll color management system integration

Nicolas Mailhot nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net
Wed Dec 12 17:35:56 UTC 2007


Hi all,

The FLOSS color management scene (calibrating screens for pictures or
video) is very small. In fact there is only one reference application
every other project depends on or compares itself to: Argyll CMS. Argyll
is free, supports many common (commercial and do-it-yourself) color
meters, has been actively developed for more than a decade. It was on
the Fedora package wishlist.

Unfortunately its main author is not following best release practises
and has chosen to use a non-standard unmaintained make replacement
(jam), with static linking, private copies of common libraries, and all
kinds of things distributions are not fond of. As a result no
first-level distribution shipped Argyll. Despite the fact every color
management HOWTO on the net points to it.

I started untangling the mess in October but gave up after a frustrating
week. Fortunately I had the good idea to put the result on fedorapeople,
and lately Frédéric Crozat from Mandriva googled it and completed the
work. On hindsight it seems I had stopped just short of the finish line.
http://twinpeaks.dyndns.org/blog/general/2007/12/11/monitor-calibration-epilogue

Since it'd be a shame to let my packaging work end up in Mandriva only,
I picked up his package, changed back a few bits, added some stuff I had
planned but not done yet, and pushed the result in the review queue:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=421921

I'd appreciate if a friendly reviewer looked at the result.

The following work has been done:
– link against system libs, not built-in copies
– build with modular X
– remove the shell wrapper that was hiding build errors from rpm
– reorder build logic to fix those errors
– hal/pam/udev logic so colorimeters do not need root access

The result is IMHO good enough to be merged. However, since this
software has suffered from a secluded life due to the aforementioned
problems, it would probably be a good idea if more clueful people than
me checked the following points:

– go over the build logs, check if the warnings are really harmless and
fix the code if needed (where is the list of people that wanted to do
this kind of work a few months ago?)
http://nim.fedorapeople.org/argyllcms/build.log
I doubt argyllcms was ever built with a modern gcc with all the fancy
options we use and for all the architectures we target

– check if I got the hal/pam/udev logic right, push bits upstream if
needed (I didn't find two Fedora packages that did it the same way, all
I can say the way I did it works on my system)

– check if upstream didn't mess up licensing as it did the code

Then we'll have one key app for photographers and video buffs nailed,
and there will only be the matter of pushing fixes upstream.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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