Re: Displaying wallpapers in /usr/share/backgrounds/ in settings

[Michael Ikey Doherty <michael i doherty intel com>]

IIRC the original reasoning for having the .xml descriptions was having
a nice way to provide human readable names of artwork that could be
chosen in the old GNOME 2 gnome-appearance-properties dialog.

I'm somewhat against enabling some form of ruthless search
against /usr/share/backgrounds, as some other tools do. I'm also
somewhat against having automatic recursion of ~/Pictures, for
performance reasons. 

Given that by default most tools send anything of picture form to
~/Pictures/, even screenshot tools, some web browsers when you
download.. it might make sense having an optional Wallpapers directory,
so that they're split.

Then again, you lose the comfort of XDG user directories and need to
find a way of fitting yet another option into the UI somewhere.. 
A nice compromise could simply be an "add" button to not need to use
gnome-tweak-tool (though you can already use this to chose a wallpaper
outside of the normal directories, though admittedly its not integrated
with GCC)

Sidenote: I'm also instinctively against /usr/local/share/backgrounds,
for a number of reasons. As a distribution developer, I just avoid
having /usr/local at all, and at any rate that's still part of the root
filesystem. User changes should be restricted to the home directory :)

- Ikey

On Sat, 2014-03-15 at 18:54 +1100, Tim wrote:
> While backgrounds themselves are probably pretty harmless, it is in general a bad idea to be manually 
> installing stuff in the main filesystem.
> Not something that should be encouraged, it can and will cause havoc with packaging systems.
>
> Perhaps it would be better to use:
> /usr/local/share/backgrounds
> for this purpose.
>
>
> On 15/03/14 18:34, Petko Ditchev wrote:
> > In my opinion with the current look and functionality of the control centre there is no need to define 
> > every wallpaper in an .xml schema . In
> > those schemas I saw mostly internationalisation of the wallpaper name which is not used. Assuming that 
> > the <options><pcolor><scolor> tags are
> > super essential I'll leave that thought alone and move on to the next one:
> >  Let's have an option to choose the "backgrounds" folder in the "Pictures" tab of the wallpapers chooser. 
> > It's a one button solution that
> > doesn't require me to move my backgrounds to a "Pictures" folder that ideally I don't want to deal with. 
> > It's not that I'm that lazy, but
> > since I sync a lot of the information on my computers, pictures and backgrounds included, creating some 
> > out-of-the-sync-tree folders is
> > problematic. Again - it's not just my case, I believe it would be a principally better solution.
> >
> > Petko
> >
> > On 03/15/2014 12:14 AM, Michael Ikey Doherty wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > As far as I know this isn't possible via dconf. There are a number of
> > > sources available, via the Grilo backend.
> > >
> > > Main ones:
> > >
> > > ~/Pictures:
> > > pictures_path = g_get_user_special_dir (G_USER_DIRECTORY_PICTURES);
> > >
> > > Anything from /usr/share/backgrounds *has* to be defined in an XML file
> > > (It's actually been this way for a *long time*)
> > >
> > > Check inside /usr/share/gnome-background-properties/*.xml
> > > Here's an example from Fedora's branding changes:
> > >
> > > <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> > > <!DOCTYPE wallpapers SYSTEM "gnome-wp-list.dtd">
> > > <wallpapers>
> > >      <wallpaper deleted="false">
> > >          <name>Schrödinger’s Cat Animated</name>
> > >
> > > <filename>/usr/share/backgrounds/schroedinger-cat/default-animated/schroedinger-cat.xml</filename>
> > >          <options>stretched</options>
> > >      </wallpaper>
> > > </wallpapers>
> > >
> > >
> > > So, you'd need to provide one for each wallpaper you intended to ship
> > > in /usr/share/backgrounds. This is intended behaviour as those
> > > backgrounds are vendor-shipped (Or, layman's terms, they're already
> > > pre-packaged and accounted for in your distributions repositories)
> > >
> > > The easiest thing is to just copy files into ~/Pictures (Localization
> > > may provide a different name, it's your XDG Pictures directory)
> > >
> > > - Ikey
> > >
> > > On Fri, 2014-03-14 at 22:29 +0200, Petko Ditchev wrote:
> > > > Hello, I want to ask if there's a way (dconf setting or whatever else)
> > > > to make the wallpaper chooser display non-GNOME wallpapers that are in
> > > > the backgrounds directory? And as a side question - why restrict to
> > > > those in the first place ?!
> > > >
> > > > Petko
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > desktop-devel-list mailing list
> > desktop-devel-list gnome org
> > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
>
> _______________________________________________
> desktop-devel-list mailing list
> desktop-devel-list gnome org
> https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list


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