freedesktop thumbnail spec: modification proposal, central development

[Jannis Pohlmann]

On Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:55:52 +0200
Alexander Larsson <alexl at redhat.com> wrote:

> 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.

Looks fine to me. Not sure we need hashed-normal/ and hashed-failed/
directories because subdirectories inside ~/.thumbnails/normal and
~/.thumbnails/failed wouldn't conflict with the old thumbnail files.

(Personally, I'd like to propose to merge all the failed/
subdirectories into a single directory -- failed/ -- because IMHO the
failed/ concept is just broken. But that's another story.)

  - Jannis
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