Re: Call for hackfest ideas

["Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak" <mjc avtechpulse com>]

> So if you can think of a topic that would be suitable for a hackfest,
> please talk about it with a few people and share your idea.

I'd like to suggest one possible topic: The pixbuf loaders. They're slow 
and memory intensive, and this drags down anything that needs thumbnails 
(Nautilus, etc). There is a lot of opportunity to improve the 
responsiveness of the desktop here.

More specifically, some pixbuf loaders (png and tiff) load the entire 
image, and then scale it. This leads to huge memory usage (bug 142428) 
loading the image.

Worse, after the initial pixbuf is loaded, the gtk+ scaling routines 
collapse for high scaling ratios (bug 80925). A 20 kilobyte png file can 
bring Nautilus to its knees (bug 522803).

Ideally the pixbuf loaders would incorporate some scale-while-loading 
(for example, see tifftopnm -byrow) for sized requests, and the gtk+ 
scaling routines would also be fixed. (The jpeg routines have a limited 
amount for scaling-while-loading already.)

I don't have the expertise to fix any of this, but I do want to make the 
problems known...

- Mike