Understanding f-spot import dialog issues

[Ryan Harper <raharper gmail com>]

Hello,

I've been using f-spot for some time since it's been included in
Ubuntu.  In switching between Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10, I've noticed a
couple if things that have caught my attention and I'd like to dig in
and see if I can help out.  When I ran f-spot (0.5.0.3) on 9.04, I'd
stick in my SD card into my laptop and the f-spot importer would come
up and I'd be able to import the photos, and as a nice side-effect,
the camera movies (.MOV) files also got copied into the Photos
directory along side.  This was idea since it ensured I got a copy of
all of the files the camera generated.  F-spot in 9.10 no longer does
this.  I spent some time rebuilding the version of f-spot that came
with 9.04 on 9.10 only to find out that it the older version of f-spot
on 9.10 skipped over the .MOV files.  Looking at the source code,
namely FileImportBackend.sc, it seems that not copying files for which
F-spot doesn't have a loader for (see AddPath call to HasLoader) and
of course there isn't a loader for MOV file.  I'm wondering then, if
the code in f-spot for ubuntu 9.04 shouldn't be copying the MOV files,
then how does that happen on 9.04 (8.10, 8.04, 7.10 IIRC all had this
side-effect behavior) but not on 9.10.  I'm wondering if it's a
wider-gnome or mono issue.  Any thoughts on this?  I'm highly
motivated to try to get that behavior back if you've got any ideas on
how to handle this.

Second issue I've seen while debugging the above issue has a bug:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=526355

Looking at the same code in FileImportBackend.cs, it's quite clear how
this is the case:

If copy is selected in the import dialog,  the code in the
FileImportBackend.cs:Step() function calls the System.IO.Copy function
and will copy the file to the destination location before creating a
ImageFIle instance of the image.  This happens before one hits the
import button.  Upon hitting the import button, since the files are
already copied, the result is that the images and tags are committed
to the db.

Thinking back to previous versions of f-spot (0.5.0.3 in 9.04 for
example) this didn't happen, rather, the thumbnail list was loaded
from the media and once you hit import, you got a separate window
indicating the copying process ...  I'm wondering if this also might
be related to gnome or mono changes.

Ryan Harper