Regarding the version implementation in F-Spot

["Marcus Hast" <marcushast gmail com>]

Hi all,
I've been looking for something to do on the project for a while and I
figured looking into the versioning system would be the easiest of the
things I was considering. (I realize now that I was probably wrong,
but never mind that.)

The original idea was to add functionality to make it possible to
combine Raw files and JPEGs as versions. (It's been mentioned on the
mailing list not too long ago.) But as has been mentioned the current
implementation requires that different versions of the same file must
have the same file extension.

Now changing only that part wouldn't be too much problem, but I figure
it might be worth to look into other limitations as well. For me a
limitation is that a version of a photo is pretty much defined by the
original photo, it doesn't exist as a separate photo in the system.
This creates several quite arbitrary limitations, eg it's not possible
to have different tags or descriptions for the different versions.

It might be an idea to look into extending the system so it's easier
to later on write the version data to XMP fields. (It requires to have
a document ID and version IDs for each version.) The document ID is
suggested to be eg MD5 hash of the original image. The versions may
not be a good idea to have has MD5's as the data may be changed when
processing the image.

Any other thoughts about this? Something to take into consideration
when implementing it?

/Marcus Hast