[Clipart] Comma-separated keywords in metadata

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Tobias Jakobs <tobias.jakobs at web.de> writes:

> Yes, there is the "Thumbnail Managing Standard"[1] from
> freedesktop.org.
  
Ah.  I'll have a look at that.  If it meets our needs, we should use
it in preference to a different spec (e.g., copying some application's
behavior or making up our own).

> I just asked about it on on #gimp and attached the log [2]. 

Interesting and useful, thanks...

> <tobias_> It's for the openclipart.org. We thought about integrating
> thumbnails into the Clipart packets
> <neo> I see
> <neo> the standard is missing an important feature to make that possible
> <neo> it doesn't allow for thumbs outside of the ~/.thumbnails dir

We could have a magic directory in our clipart package that stands in
for this directory, methinks...

Bear in mind that the packages in question need to be usable across
all major platforms, so hardcoding things like ~ is simply not going
to be acceptable, but a directory name like clipart/.thumbnails would
be workable (assuming we're putting the whole package into the clipart
directory).  Whatever we settle on will need to be able to be stored
in the same zipfile (or whatever archive format we select for our
package, but zip seems best to me) as the images.

Anyway, we could hold the thumbnails to a certain directory within the
archive, but its location has to be relative to the main directory of
the archive, so that the package can unpack into a single directory.

If software that understands the thumbnails wants to put them in
~/.thumbnails, that's great, but the user ought to be able in a pinch
to just unzip the thing with a standard unzipping utility and get
something useful, and they need to be able to do that on all major
platforms, not just POSIX.  We don't use modules like File::Spec so we
can go back to the bad old days of building things that only work on
certain systems.

> <neo> tobias_: the spec isn't set in stone
> <neo> tobias_: if you want to discuss changes, please join xdg-list

Someone here should look up xdg-list and see if we can get our little
magic-directory deviation codified so that other software can
interoperate with it by following that spec.

I'll look at the spec first, and then if I run out of more urgent
things to do before someone beats me to it I'll look up that xdg list.

> <neo> it's not that it would be hard to get the spec changed
> <neo> just need to sit down and write down proposed changes
> <neo> of course they should be backward-compatible

It's encouraging to see this attitude.

-- 
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