thumbnail mtime, ctime

[Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak]

Thiago Macieira wrote:
> I don't think a failed thumbnail should be saved under those conditions. 

The spec says "For every thumbnail generation failure the program 
creates an empty PNG file." It doesn't exclude permissions-related 
failures. And that is certainly how it has been implemented in gnome.

However, I think you're missing the broader point: by storing some extra 
metadata in the thumbnail (mtime seconds + subseconds, ctime seconds + 
subseconds, and file size) we can painlessly eliminate the existing 
ambiguities in identifying file changes. The information usually exists 
anyways at the time of thumbnail generation, it is just a few bytes in 
size, and it can be done in a backward and forward compatible way. So 
why not?

- Mike