And so, long story short, we decided to revert the change for F12.
Part of being an open source maintainer (and also my job at Red Hat) is to ignore trolls, but some of the messages I was getting yesterday were just personal attacks and abuse. That’s not cricket at all.
GNOME Color Manager now a mailing list – It’s for discussion about colour management in GNOME, and that sort of thing.
Late last night, after a few hours of intense refactoring (to allow udev based devices, as well as xrandr based devices) we got the initial scanner support working:
This lets us support printers and digital cameras pretty easily too. At the moment we just need to figure out how to make gnome-scan make a scan for us and save it in tiff format, and then we can get the calibration working for all types of scanners. Of course, you need a precision printed reference image, but you can get these pretty cheaply from Wolf Faust.
Then, we need to work with the gnome-scan guys to agree an interface so that gnome-scan knows what profile to use for each device. Either a library or DBus interface (with calls in either direction) are being considered, although I think the session-activated dbus interface is probably going to win. There’s still quite a bit of integration work to make CUPS ICC profile aware, but that’s on the list after scanners are working. After all, you need a calibrated scanner to calibrate the printer. Help is always welcome, so please checkout the code and help find bugs.
GNOME Color Manager now has a website. The mailing list will be set up soon, which means we can start building a community.
I’ve also recently completed the calibration integration, using the great ArgyllCMS to do the heavy lifting. This means it’s literally two clicks (with no options!) to generate an accurate screen profile with hardware that costs less than $50. And it only takes about 15 minutes. Anyone that takes photos or cares about colour accuracy should really invest in one of these things.
Also, a few people have been telling me to just write a GNOME front end for Oyranos and scrap what’s already been done. While I think Oyranos is a great project, I needed something that “just worked” and did the bare minimum integration without a hundred configuration options or integration points. I’ve also been told that some parts of colour management are heavily patented, and so I’m going to keep things as simple as possible for now so gnome-color-manager can be used in as many places as possible. If the Oyranos guys want to hook into gnome-color-manager then that would be great, but I think for now, GNOME Color Manager should aim to do much less than what the Oyranos guys have been trying to achieve.