freedesktop thumbnail spec: modification proposal, central development

[Alexander Larsson]

On Sat, 2009-08-22 at 16:14 +0200, Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
> 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.

When i said global there i meant it as how it would work with global
fail files an how that would then lead to a problem

> 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. 

I think the problem here is that the GIO thumbnail stuff only does the
reading part of the thumbnail spec, and the fail stuff sort of implies
that each implementation handles the whole spec (i.e. reading +
creating) so that the right fail directory gets used when reading. 

> 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).

This seems a bit simplified. What is it about gimp vs other apps that
implies that gimp should have its own failed directory when others
should not. Yes, your example of tumbler does share the failed directory
with a few other apps (the ones using GIO), but definately not all (for
instance KDE ones).