freedesktop thumbnail spec: modification proposal, central development

[Jannis Pohlmann]

On Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:25:25 +0200
Alexander Larsson <alexl at redhat.com> wrote:

> 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).

Exactly, and IMHO that's the problem. (BTW, I'm not saying GIMP should
have its own fail directory unless it's really needed.) Any
thumbnailing implementation, be it GnomeThumbnailFactory,
ThunarVfsThumbFactory, GIMP's libgimpthumb, hildon-thumbnailer or
tumbler are supposed to store fail files in their own directories. 

I agree that at a first glance, this might sound reasonable. But if GIO
only picks the fail files from ~/.thumbnails/gnome-thumbnail-factory/,
and KDE only picks up the files from ~/.thumbnails/<insert KDE
directory here>/ this implies that implementations that aim to support
all VFS layers and applications properly will have to create fail files
in all these directories.

IMHO that's not very useful and it sounds like a violation of the spec
to write to all those directories from a thumbnailing implementation's
POV. 

Now that we're adopting GIO everywhere inside Xfce, I'd be
very happy to see many of the (luckily few) now-hardcoded bits in GIO
(and also other VFS implementations and applications) transformed into
standards. 

This also applies to preferred applications (e.g. GIO only checks a few
common terminal emulators for the Terminal= key of .desktop entries
because there is no standard for preferred applications yet), just to
provide another example.

  - Jannis
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