Review Request: include KolorManager in kdegraphics

[Thomas Zander]

Quoting Daniel Nicoletti <dantti85-dev at yahoo.com.br>:
> So how do we go into the merit discussion without creating yet  
> another flame war?

I'm sorry, but merit has to be the metric, that's the basis of both  
open source in general and KDE specifically. I'd like KDE to avoid  
sliding towards a social support group ;)

We had a little talk about those two projects recently on k-c-d as  
well, where colord was proposed and Kai used that opportunity to plug  
his project.

I then went and downloaded both codebases and looked at them.

First thing that I'm worried about is that the whole project is  
designed around user roles (called policies).  As I have been involved  
with KDE usability I have seen discussions and concepts of user roles  
a lot. Frankly, they don't work. There is almost no research to  
support them, there is plenty of research stating they don't work.
Then there is the technical dependency tree of Oyranos;  this shows a  
subsection of its deps;
http://pkgs.org/fedora-16/fedora-x86_64/oyranos-libs-0.3.1-1.fc16.x86_64.rpm.html
Thats a lot of dependencies;  some of them anything but easy to find packaged.
Compare to http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/colord

All of this could be ignored, as long as there is real cooperation and  
willingness to work together; so I looked at how lively the Oyranos  
community is.
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=oyranos-devel

I don't know why  colord was created instead of working with Kai on  
his mostly one-man project, it may have been for very good reasons, it  
may have been just not-invented-here.  But the end result is that the  
new project is quickly replacing the longer existing one both in  
developer community and in usage.

And thats a good point; how many people use it in the wild?  I find  
the debian popularity contest insightful;
http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=colord
If you don't have a good idea what those numbers are, compare to;  
http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=k3b or  
http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=kdebase-workspace both of  
which have a lower install score than colord.


So, last time the colord and oyranos projects where mentioned on  
kde-core-devel, this amounts to the data I looked through and got my  
impressions on.
I personally came to the conclusion that KDE is probably better off by  
focusing on colord, even if there is currently no KDE gui for it.

-- 
Thomas Zander