Quoting Daniel Nicoletti <[email protected]>:
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
