Re: Digital camera support (was: Re: help sanity check the release notes)

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Wed, 2008-02-27 at 21:32 -0500, Hubert Figuiere wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-02-27 at 20:37 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-02-27 at 20:28 -0500, Hubert Figuiere wrote:
> > > Why not using camera:// ?
> > 
> > Because it might conflict with another camera gvfs backend we might want
> > to add in the future?
> 
> Using what?

I dunno, some library someone wrote for accessing Firewire cameras? Or a
new parallel-installable major revision of gphoto? The point here is to
be careful and not paint ourselves into a corner.

Besides, don't get too hung up on the URI's. These should never be shown
in the UI _anyway_.

> That would also mean applications wouldn't be able to use it as they
> would need to know about it. Nothing is being abstracted in the end.

Applications shouldn't really care what kind of file system the photos
are on. That's the whole point of a VFS; that they use the same nice API
(which is gio) no matter where the files are. And with
x-content/image-dcf the mounts with a DCF fs on will be easy to find.
This support will be in 2.24.

> > > And you could aslo add support for Mass Storage camera at the same time
> > > so that it be unified. Two way to do that: just "rebind" the mounted
> > > device or use the disk: driver in gphoto2.
> > 
> > Why would we ever want to do that? It would dog slow and the gphoto2 API
> > is a bit craptastic; you can't do partial reads etc. etc. Besides, Mass
> > storage cameras already work very well using the kernel mass storage
> > drivers.
> 
> Not if access the file system directly (which is the solution #1 I just
> proposed when I said "rebinding"). So far you are not making the
> application implementation easier as they'd have to distinguish one with
> the other.

Sorry, I really don't know what this means.

> BTW your comment about libgphoto2 API are still being awaited on the
> gphoto-devel mailing list. For now it is a bit of an "in your face"
> gratuitous comment.

Well, I'm sorry for using the word craptastic. Let me apologize for
this. I just didn't find a way to read only parts of a file. Which I'm
sure you will agree is suboptimal. If there is a way please let me know.
Thanks.

     David