Re: tiff multi-document files

[Jens Finke <jens triq net>]

Hi George,

On Sat, 17 Jan 2004, George Karabin wrote:
> I want to add a gnome-vfs module to map libtiff's directory feature to 
> a gnome-vfs URI with archive-file-format-like methods. For each image 
> file it opens, eog would test to see if it's image/tiff, and then try 
> to open the directory. If the module's installed, then it'll get a 
> directory handle and create the collection.

Nice.

> Does the idea sound OK in principle for eog? I'm not sure how much eog 
> wants to know about file-format-specific stuff like this, so I'm asking 
> up-front. I don't think it makes sense to handle these sorts of files 
> in gdk - this doesn't really map well to the animation interface, and 
> there wouldn't be enough developers using it to justify changing APIs. 
> So if this is done, eog has to learn about this tiff idiosyncrasy.
> 
> Likewise, does this sound OK for gnome-vfs? I think there's less 
> controversy here, but this is a fairly obscure use case. I can't 
> imagine too many apps actually caring to use this, so I hope it's not 
> considered bloat and a bad dependency.

Actually, I think it should be possible to write a gnome-vfs module, which
adds a new URI scheme and handles such tiff files properly. If it behaves
like a directory from the gnome-vfs client point of view, eog will
automatically use the collection view for this then.

I am not very familar with 3rd party gnome-vfs modules, but AFAICS you 
neither need to touch gnome-vfs nor eog to get this working. 

Regards,

  Jens