[argyllcms] Re: I seem to be losing the installed LUT in X or someting along those lines. Help!
- From: Roland Mas <lolando@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: argyllcms@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:53:08 +0200
Graeme Gill, 2010-07-29 20:26:44 +1000 :
> Richard Hughes wrote:
[...]
>> Put yourself in my shoes. Fedora is very strict about using external
>> libraries rather than internal ones, and I had to do quite a bit of
>> work to allow argyll to continue to be shipped in Fedora. I deal with
>> a lot of upstream projects in my day-to-day work and argyll is much
>> harder than most to package. Including 4 modified copies of external
>> libraries is not exactly best practice in software development. Using
>> a build system that's obsolete and needs patching before running is
>> kinda unusual. All these things raise the bar for pushing this to
>> millions of users.
>
> Hi,
>
> Sorry, but to me it is simply disfunctional behaviour - Fedora
> deserves to fail if it puts dogma ahead of practicality.
Despite my previous emails, I have to side with Richard here. What
you call “dogma” is actually considered “best practices” in the
distribution world, and it's *based on* practicality and experience.
Embedded copies of libraries are an extra burden for distributors
because of the combinatorics involved when one of these libraries needs
to be updated for whatever reason (security update, porting to a new
architecture, porting to a new version of a compiler, porting to an
entirely different compiler, and so on). Shared libraries actually help
maintain a working system with a reasonable amount of work, and that's a
practical advantage. The same applies for the build system: many people
dislike autotools, but many people understand it, which means that
maintenance work isn't restricted to a few gurus.
It does push some more work upstream, of course (pushing for
integration of your patches into the libraries you forked), but it
actually provides practical benefits: distributors can focus on their
integration work, upstream authors can focus on their project (where
they're most competent), the same applies for authors of libraries, and
in the end users get up-to-date software on their distribution.
Pointing the users to your site is good for some users, but not everyone
wants to grab and compile stuff themselves. On the other hand, there's
machinery in the distribution that can go “Hey, it seems you have a
colorimeter plugged into this computer, shall I install Argyll for you?”
and the user gets it all working in a matter of seconds (that's called
discover-pkginstall in Debian, something similar probably exists for
other distros). Making it easier for the distro to ship an Argyll
that's as close to the original as possible is good for everyone.
Pardon the rant :-)
Roland.
--
Roland Mas
Bonjour, je suis un virus de signature. Propagez-moi dans la vôtre !
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