change thumbnailer spec to fit better with xdg-basedir spec

[A. Walton]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 10:15 AM, Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak
<mjc at avtechpulse.com> wrote:
> Martin Meyer wrote:
>   > The thumbnailer spec [3] points to the ~/.thumbnails directory for the
>  > cache of specific-sized thumbnails. Although I call them cache, it is
>  > arguable that they may be user data. The issue I have is that the
>  > basedir spec [4] specifies an environment variable $XDG_CACHE_HOME
>  > which is intended as the base for all "user-specific non-essential
>  > (cached) data". I feel that the thumbnail cache would fit in there. Is
>  > there a chance of getting the spec changed to point to
>  > $XDG_CACHE_HOME/thumbnails instead perhaps? Is it even open for
>  > discussion?
>
>  Martin,
>
>  Yes, it's open for discussion. Is it fundamentally worth the effort?

It keeps the FDO specs internally consistent, which IMO is reason
enough to do it. There's fundamentally nothing special about
thumbnails; they're just shared cache, which is the reason for the
cache dir's existence.

>  Do you have suggestions for managing the transition, if it occurred?
>  ".thumbnails" is hard-coded in a LOT of files (libgnomeui, nautilus,
>  glib/gfile, gthumb, gnome-settings-daemon, etc...)
>
>  On the gnome side, you would need to patch every instance of
>  ".thumbnails". (Maybe we need a gnome_thumbnail_get_cache_dir function.)
>  The gnome-settings-daemon housekeeping plug-in would need to be modified
>  to sweep both the old and new locations.

Or rather in GLib, g_get_user_thumbnails_dir(), since it's the least
common denominator in that group. Then again this function probably
should have existed for quite some time, since its present-day
counterpart is synthesized in all of those places mentioned above. So
then as a first step for us, we could move the existing code to e.g.
"g_get_user_thumbnails_dir()" in GNOME to make this transition easier,
if that's what we all agree on. And even if it doesn't end up
happening now, at least we're futureproof.

-A. Walton

>  On a side note, your original post is missing the reference ([1], etc).
>
>  - Mike
>
>
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