Module proposal: GNOME Color Manager

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

Purpose: GNOME Color Manager is a session framework for the GNOME
desktop environment that makes it easy to manage easy to manage,
install and generate color profiles.

Target: Desktop

Dependencies: gtk, vte, lcms, gudev, libtiff, cups,
shared-color-profiles, gconf, xrandr, gnome-desktop, dbus-glib

Optional Dependencies: PackageKit

Soft Dependencies (installed using PackageKit at runtime if required
and available): argyllcms, shared-color-targets

Resource usage: GNOME FTP for releases, GNOME git for development,
GNOME project website, GNOME bugzilla.

Adoption: Will be installed by Fedora 13 by default, and many other
distros are already including it in repos. I'm pushing other projects
like GIMP and darktable to use the DBus interfaces provided by GCM.

GNOME-ness, community: We're working upstream in the different
projects putting the hooks in the right place. For instance, we're
working on a patchset for GTK so we can color convert cairo surfaces
or GdkPixbufs in the toolkit, rather than in each application. My
icc-profile patches to gdk-pixbuf have already been included in recent
GTK releases. We're being translated by the GNOME internationalization
dudes, and we do regular string and UI review. We're trying to be good
citizens and integrate heavily with other projects. We've already got
a thriving community filing bugs and supplying patches.

3.0 readiness: No applets, already using DG_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES,
-DGTK_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES, DG_DISABLE_DEPRECATED,
-DGTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED, -DGDK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED and -DGSEAL_ENABLE
and will switch to GSettings as soon as the branch hits glib2 master.
Aiming for "done" in all the previous GNOME goals. The yelp file is
work-in-progress but we'll hopefully have it finished in the next few
weeks.

License: GPLv2+

Miscellaneous: If you're taking photos, scanning in documents or
printing images, then color accuracy is going to be very important.
GNOME Color Manager allows you to install default profiles, or
generate profiles using a hardware colorimeter device. It's also
really easy to use. Linux in general is severely lacking when it comes
to using color management in key applications by default. OSX and
Windows 7 clearly show by making color management easy for the end
user, it can be integrated into their working pattern to great affect.
By providing a way to manage and assign profiles in GNOME we can make
it easy for creative people to see the same color they just scanned,
and also then see the same color when the document is printed. Only by
making this stuff easy to use we'll actually get people to achieve
this.

There are some more resources:

The upstream homepage: http://projects.gnome.org/gnome-color-manager/
The fedora feature page: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ColorManagement
Some screenshots: http://projects.gnome.org/gnome-color-manager/screenshots.html
Latest code: http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-color-manager/tree

Comments welcome. Thanks,

Richard.