change thumbnailer spec to fit better with xdg-basedir spec

[Martin Meyer]

Hi all!

Sorry for missing the footnotes earlier... here they are:

[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=523057
[2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=523174
[3] should be available at
http://jens.triq.net/thumbnail-spec/index.html, but there is a
permissions problem currently.
[4] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/basedir-spec

For me, the end goal is having less stuff in ~, and being able to
simply delete ~/.cache and ~/.config when I suspect a profile issue is
causing a bug I see. Right now I hunt all around to figure out where
the appropriate files are to delete and such. I do think though that
consistency between specs is extremely important, which is a good
reason I think to amend the spec.

For GNOME, I think that only libgnomeui and glib will have to be
patched. I believe that every app which involves thumbnails uses these
two libraries  (though it eventually should be glib exclusively) to
handle thumbnails. No app that I know of would have a reason to
hard-code that path, but I can ask in bug [2] above to confirm that.

In terms of migration, there are already several apps that need
similar migration paths for their config data and cache data in order
to convert to a basedir-compliant directory scheme. I don't imagine it
will be that hard to find a place to put the migration code, but I'll
ask in the bug [2].

I'll ask the two questions as a followup in the GNOME bug: what about
data migration? What apps, if any, hard-code that path? Hopefully I'll
get some info out of them and can post back.

Do we need to talk to the KDE folks about this? Do they follow the
thumbnail spec? Is there a process for notifying interested parties
when the spec is updated? Sorry. I'm a n00b and don't know how that
stuff works...

Thanks everyone for the responses and enthusiasm!

Martin

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 11:37 AM, Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak
<mjc at avtechpulse.com> wrote:
> Martin Meyer wrote:
>
> > (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?
> >
>
>  It sounds like we have a positive consensus...
>
>  I am working on creating a new docbook version of the thumbnail spec. Once
> it is ready, I'll propose a patch to reflect the movement of the thumbnail
> cache.
>
>  - Mike
>