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

[Petko Ditchev <pditchev gmail com>]

On 03/15/2014 12:15 PM, Michael Ikey Doherty wrote:
> 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.
Fair enough. I still think that since it's not used any more it should 
be deprecated, but if I were one of the developers I guess I wouldn't 
talk so lightly about that.
> 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.
Well /usr/share/backgrounds isn't really a random directory, so 
searching in it shouldn't be considered ruthless. The only wallpapers 
that end up there are either distro-specific, desktop-associated (part 
of GNOME/XFCE,etc...), or installed by packages. It seems pretty 
regulated to me, and I wouldn't expect a user to throw random stuff there.
 As for searching in ~/Pictures - yes that makes no sense at all. At 
least not when you can't change it to your own backgrounds/ directory. 
If there were such an option ~/Pictures would be a sane default.
> 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)
Where you can fit an "Add" button - you can fit a "Choose dir" button. I 
know everybody's crazy about minimalism right now, and adding a user 
option in GNOME or Unity is like trying to make the designers eat a bowl 
of acid, but sometimes it's good to have nice things.

Petko

> 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