Re: Color managed GtkImage

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Tue, 2010-01-05 at 13:44 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> Now, Matthias has already said that he's not keen on a lcms dep for
> GTK, (which I understand) but would adding the functionality to
> GtkImage and registering an extension point be a wise thing to do? In
> this case we add a lcms module (or argyll, etc) that implements the
> conversion of the GdkPixbuf to display profile. All applications
> become color managed for free.
> 
> Or we do something different, and just ship a gnome-color-manager
> library, libgnomecolor (better names welcomed) that just ships this
> code, and get applications to depend on that. I'm not overly keen on
> this idea at the moment as we're trying to reduce the number of tiny
> utility libraries, not increase them.
> 
> Ideas welcome.

I would prefer going the extension point route (and actually use the GIO
extension point machinery for this) - e.g. provide color management APIs
in GTK+ proper and just return ENOTSUP or similar if no suitable color
management extension is available. Then people for whom the lcms
dependency is too big or doesn't make sense (say, certain embedded
devices) can just choose not to install it. It's kinda similar to how
GIO and GVfs works.

This probably also means that you need to take (at least) Win32 and OS X
into account when designing the public GTK+ APIs - e.g. you need to make
sure the API can be implemented on these platforms preferably using
native Win32 and OS X color management APIs.

Just my two cents.

Thanks,
David