freedesktop thumbnail spec: modification proposal, central development

[Jannis Pohlmann]

On Sat, 22 Aug 2009 13:58:17 +0200
Alexander Larsson <alexl at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 2009-08-21 at 14:13 +0200, Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
> 
> > (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.)

(Err, it's fail/, not failed/ ...)

> I think the idea behind it is that each thumbnail creator may support
> a different set of types, and if it cannot thumbnail a file and then
> creates a global file that stops other implementations from trying it
> they wouldn't even try even though they may support it. Of course,
> whether you think this is a problem or not is another thing entierly.

You say "global" but in reality those are per-implementation files.
GIMP creates fail files in fail/gimp-2.6/, GIO only looks for them in
fail/gnome-thumbnail-factory/ and so on.

I think this is especially problematic with GIO (and probably the KDE
equivalent too) because if someone writes an application that generates
thumbnails, like I did with tumbler, it needs to write fail files to
fail/gnome-thumbnail-factory/ to make GIO's thumbnail::* attributes
work properly. 

IMHO the fail/ directory should really contain global files. If
applications need to store information about failed thumbnails that
only they themselves are interested in (as is or could be the case with
GIMP), they should create them somewhere else (e.g. somewhere inside
~/.cache/gimp-2.6).

Might just be me, but I feel that this asymmetry (global
normal/, large/ vs. per-implementation fail/) is problematic.

> We do however need some form of failed reporting so that apps don't
> keep trying to thumbnail some broken file over and over.

Agreed.

  - Jannis
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