why do I need colord?

[Peter Robinson]

On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 7:34 PM, Adam Jackson <ajax at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 11/8/11 1:59 PM, Peter Robinson wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 6:53 PM, Adam Jackson <ajax at redhat.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On a server like that, you won't have cups installed, so nothing will be
>>> pulling in colord.  Whereas if you _do_ have cups installed, because it's
>>> a
>>> print server, then you might like very much for the colors in the image
>>> on
>>> the screen to match the colors deposited on the paper.
>>
>> Until LSB gets updated you often do get it pulled in though (and a lot
>> of GUI stuff as well) unfortunately.
>
> I assume "don't install LSB compatibility crap" isn't an option for some
> reason.  Sigh.  Bad standards sure are bad, aren't they.

depends on what the customer is installing. Some proprietary
enterprise appy things demand it, pity it couldn't be split out like
the RH packges are with different profiles, we don't install it unless
we have to, unfortunately we often do!

>> Its a lot more than 1Mb, and its something we constantly have to fight
>> to keep the dependencies sane.
>
> $ rpm -q --qf="%{size}\n" colord lcms2 sane-backends-libs | awk 'BEGIN { i=0
> } { i += $1 } END { print i }'
> 1049219

At the moment sane-backends-libs depends on sane-backends (looking at
a patch to fix that now actually).

>> As ARM ramps up and people get more and
>> more interested in running gnome on fedora on all sorts of tablet and
>> similar devices with small amounts of storage it will receive more and
>> more attention I suspect.
>
> My frustration with the "small footprint" crowd in general is that (and I
> mean no personal offense, this is an imprecise gun I'm shooting with) they
> seem unwilling or unable to do more work to achieve their footprint targets
> than can be accomplished with configure flags.
>
> To pick a favorite whipping boy, the 'pth' library is one of those wonderful
> false-economy-of-portability things to give you something vaguely like a
> thread library on OSes that don't have threads.  You would think there'd be
> no reason for this on Linux.  But no, gnupg2 links against it instead of
> pthreads because that's More Portable, in the clever definition of the
> phrase that means "equally burdensome everywhere".  So now it's on every
> machine, because yum requires gnupg2.
>
> Why would you argue against 1M of useful functionality but not attempt to
> excise 250k of dead weight?

Generally I'm not, it ends up being about entire dep trees and what
they pull in. Sometimes you can fix a single dep and get a big win
right down the tree. I do love colord but would love it more if it was
more modular. Its dependencies are improving with all the bugs I've
filed. It use to be that it pulled in all the printer, scanner and
camera stuff even if you weren't using that. The printer, scanner and
camera stuff then pulled in every possible combination of HW and stuff
that people might own and you ended up with all sorts of other fun
stuff as a result. This was in the 100s of Mb, which is fine if you
have tb of storage, or even 100s of gb but not when its 10%+ of your
storage. Its a lot better and I keep filing bugs as things come up.

Peter