[argyllcms] Re: More on instrument access
- From: Graeme Gill <graeme@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: argyllcms@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:16:44 +1100
Leonard Evens wrote:
This is something that I'm not sure I understand. The sorts of things
we've been talking about in connection with udev are functions of the
kernel, and unless I'm completely off base, all Linux versions use the
same kernels.
Not really. Different releases use different versions of the kernel,
and (naturally) old releases use old kernel versions. Also, things
like udev are a building block. Different distro's seem to
use it different ways (ie. different default udev configuration
files), meaning that there are subtle differences with how
an application needs to work within the distro.
Things like HAL and PolicyKit are (as I understand it)
an attempt to put another layer on top of this again,
to better isolate applications from this sort of detail.
If this is the aim, it's a good idea, but it's frustrating
that it's taking so long to become useful and settled.
I suspect there's a lot of catch 22 going on here. Linux isn't
very friendly for non-distro applications, so there aren't
as many of them, and kernel and distro developers don't
see them much or have to worry about them much, so
Linux and the distro's aren't very friendly for non-distro
applications, etc.
This page has some interesting observations that parallel
what I see:
<http://autopackage.org/faq.html?PHPSESSID=d25dcaf01b9e82a2137c69387b12c8ae#3_1>
I don't choose to dump on Graeme since he certainly has the right to do
what he thinks best. I just hope that someone else will try to deal
with these other issues. I would try it myself except I'm too old and
tired to try to be a developer. When enough serious photographers are
using Linux, I think all these problems will be solved. To some extent
this mailing list provides the needed support. Given that I figured out
what to do with Fedora, any other Fedora user can take advantage of my
experience. Similarly for other flavors of Linux. At some point, if I
have the energy, I will put on my website everything I've managed to
learn about color managment under Linux.
I'm certainly going to try and improve things, but the
way I want to go about it is as an independent application.
This doesn't stop distro's packaging it up as well, but
I'm tending to look at this as a "hard work" way of
avoiding the basic issue of Linux as a stable application
platform.
Naturally I'm going to use this forum to sound off a bit
about some of the issues as I see them :-)
The spirit for Linux and Distro developers to take this in is
as "valuable feed back from a customer", and use it to
address some of the issues, so that Linux eventually becomes better
than the alternate platforms.
As to Linux changing too often, to some extent that is a valid point.
But of course there is nothing to prevent one from using an earlier
version if one is satisfied with it.
It's a poor fallback really, as people understandably don't want
to turn their world upside-down just to run a single application.
Graeme Gill.
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