Missives from the 6th Floor

<geek-rant>
It turns out that most open source (and several commercial) RAW editing tools are built on the back of a utility called dcraw.

Further, the author of dcraw decided to write and maintain a command-line tool rather than a library of functionality and a command-line tool that exposes an interface to it. So projects that feel they need a tighter integration with dcraw than just invoking it on the command-line - including UFRaw and RawStudio - have incorporated a copy of the source directly.

UFraw has built (and rawstudio has copied and used) a C++ wrapper over the dcraw C code and are use that.

This means that updating the dcraw binary installed on your system doesn't help any of these other dependent applications - they're stuck using the version of the code they were built with.

Ain't static linking grand? Welcome to software design in the 1980's.

As an aside - I disagree with the authors assertions about libraries being bad, or hard to write, because they can't use global state (if you want a cheap cheat, define an opaque "context" object that all your functions take, and shove your "globals" into it.), and that they're harder to test (you drive the library - either using the command-line tool you wanted to write in the first place that's thunking into the library, or by writing a purpose built test harness.
</geek-rant>

But, anyway.... The end result is that I'll be playing with UFRaw, and it's integration into F-Spot a bit, and playing with Bibble a bit, and trying to work out a workflow I'm comfortable with.

But for now, I'm gonna go down stairs and find a glass of wine, 'cause enough - as they say - is enough.