New developments in the color management world

My work in color management has been bubbling away in the background, and new features are being added slowly and carefully.

One small, but nice feature is the new metadata tags that I’ve been standardising with Florian Höch and others. Of these, MAPPING_device_id is probably most interesting. This is a key that is automatically stored in the binary ICC profile itself, and stores the device ID of the device that it was created for. This means if you re-install the system, or email the profile file to someone with identical hardware, it automatically gets added as the default profile, unless you’ve manually set the device to something better.

From a security point of view, the colord daemon is no longer being ran as root, and instead uses a private group. Most of the work was done by Vincent Untz and the OpenSuse security team, but a few Ubuntu guys helped too and now we can worry less about random library vulnerabilities affecting us.

Benedikt Morbach also switched colord to optionally use a systemd service file, which will allow us to do some cool things in the future with regard to preventing network access, respawning on failure and that kind of thing.

So slowly but surely, we’re increasing the number of things that “just work” and updating colord to use a few best practices and the latest technologies. For the future, I’m looking at a wayland extension for full screen color management using a GLSL shader, but that’s some time away before it’ll be really useful, and allow us to simplify color management for applications even more by putting all the heavy lifting in toolkits.

… so we’re getting there. :)