[argyllcms] Re: ArgyllCMS V1.1.0 RC1 is now available

Pascal de Bruijn wrote:

* It's using jam, and the automake build system isn't in the tree


Automake isn't cross platform :- it isn't available on MSWindows
without installing a whole UNIX like environment, and I prefer
using Jam in any case since it's simpler to use. Perhaps some
other projects should switch to Jam too :-)


* A heavily hacked up local version of libusb is present


That's what it takes to make the project work reliably with all
the different instruments out there. While it would be great to
fix libusb so that the current version was suitable for
use with Argyll, I thought a release this November would
be better than next February...


* No public CVS, SVN or git tree is available


My code base contains some proprietary code that makes it
difficult to make public. I'm not sure if there is some
arrangement that could accommodate what you're after, if
the use cases could be explained.


* The licence has just changed, and the project has multiple licences


That's the nature of assembling a project from a number of components.


The source file is _very_ difficult to build on Linux for
distributions such as Fedora.


I'm not sure quite why that is. If you took the approach of
first building Jam and then using it to build Argyll, it might
be simpler (aren't you building Jam for the Free Type project anyway ?).


The alternative would be for one of us distro folk to "fork"
ArgyllCMS, add the automake build files and enable the system wide
libusb, and then release it as
SpecialVersionOfArgyllCMSForDistros-1.1.0.tar.gz. It would then be a
case of just updating the few source files whenever you do an upstream
release in the future. This isn't something that _I_ want to do
(unless you think it's a good idea...), as I think it would hurt
ArgyllCMS upstream.


There has been some degree of hurt caused by differences between distribution
versions and upstream already, notably with breakages. While I'm quite ready to
accommodate changes to help people use the code, there are limits.
My aims are not necessarily the same as everyone who would like
to make use of Argyll (it's not a community project, and specifically
it's not a Linux community project - it runs on a wider set of platforms
than that. Making the code available under the AGPL is a compromise -
I'm trying to make it available as open source while retaining most
useful commercial opportunities for myself, hence my choice of the most
restrictive available open source license).
I specifically chose Jam to avoid Automake, make etc., so no,
I'm not going to maintain an Automake build setup!
It would be good to get over the libusb thing - it's just a user level
library, not a kernel driver or anything terribly important. The normal
pressures of development (ie. do I want to maintain a fork of such
a library) will probably sort out the duplication in due course (either
I'll get around to helping fix libusb so I can use it unaltered, or I'll
re-implement USB support within Argyll without using libusb.)

Graeme Gill.

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