freedesktop thumbnail spec: modification proposal, central development

[Alexander Larsson]

On Fri, 2009-08-07 at 12:24 +0200, Christian Neumair wrote:
> Dear xdg list,
> 
> I originally wrote this email to Jens Finke and Olivier Sessink (CC),
> since both of them wrote the freedesktop.org thumbnail spec. However,
> none of them replied so I'm sending it here.
> 
> 
> The current thumbnail spec [1] is problematic because it proposed to put
> all thumbnails of a certain category (for instance "normal") into one
> single directory. However, from a performance point of view it makes
> sense to group the thumbnails via parent URI as proposed under [2] in
> 2007 - so that client applications can tell the OS to pre-load all the
> files for a certain directory as it is opened.
> 
> Together with that migration, it makes IMO sense to put the thumbnails
> into ~/.cache/thumbnails in accordance with the XDG base directory
> specification [3], and maybe add a per-directory cache files for storing
> the last cached icon size, which would allow file managers and other
> users that have a flexible icon layout to calculate their layout BEFORE
> having loaded all thumbnails.
> 
> Do you plan any such modifications? The fact that the spec is not hosted
> on freedesktop.org seems to be a bit unexpected, too. Is there any
> particular reason for that?

I don't think anyone in particular is working on this right now, and I
don't have much time atm. But I for sure think its a good idea. The
current scheme is a sore performance issue for many.

If you're interested in working on this and if other people agree that
its a good idea it would be great if you could do this work.