[argyllcms] Re: I seem to be losing the installed LUT in X or someting along those lines. Help!
- From: Graeme Gill <graeme@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: argyllcms@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:58:38 +1000
Roland Mas wrote:
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.
In this case it is demonstrably impractical. There is simply
no point in distributing code that has been broken in the attempt
to remove "duplicate" libraries. Stuff that actually works beats
"philosophically nice but not working" every time.
If you can't see the stupidity of what's been happening, you
really need to take a big step backwards, and have a think
about priorities.
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.
So what ? What's the point of removing a duplication that isn't
a duplication - it's actually different, and that difference
is crucial to the correct operation of the software.
[And if you do substitute one library for another, and aren't
100.00000% sure that they are exactly the same, then you'd
better bloody well be prepared to test the resulting code
at least as well as I do - that means going through all
the color instruments and checking they all work, as well
as any other functionality that could be affected. If you're
not prepared to do that THEN DON'T CHANGE IT.]
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.
It's no good for anybody when what's being distributed is broken.
And I'm not going to be held to ransom by any upstream libraries
accepting or not, essential changes to make it work for my application,
or officially releasing them in a timely manner (that is the whole _point_
of open source, after all - I have the freedom to fix things! I'm
certainly not going to let some random Linux distribution try to
take that freedom away from me!)
Linux distributions haven't earned any special treatment from me -
my aim is strictly to release cutting edge, _working_, cross
platform color software.
Graeme Gill.
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