Re: [GNOME VFS] Re: gnome-vfs API freeze items

[Jens Finke <jens triq net>]

On Tue, 4 Sep 2001, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>
> Here's a couple of comments on the spec:
>
> * The thubnail spec recommends centralized thumbnails being stored
> like this: ~/.thumbnails/96x96/opt/foo/portrait.tiff.png
>
> Instead of making a deep directory structure in ~/.thumbnails, why not
> record the path as encoded URIs?
>
> Deep directory structures are slower to access and don't generalize to
> non-file: URI schemes (I think the proposed idea of having a directory
> named `http:' directory is pretty bad - URIs have a lot of quoting
> issues and I think turning them into paths is a bad idea).

We had some discussion on this on the xdg-list on freedesktop.org. See the
thread in the archive starting at Subject: TMS: Feedback summary so far
(https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/xdg-list/2001-August/000143.html).

Please, send further comments on this to me privately only or to the
xdg-list since I think this is offtopic for these lists.

> * What if two programs try to thumbnail the same file at once?
> Shouldn't there be some kind of locking?

Yes, there should. This is one of the things need to be worked out.

> * Permissions on homedir stored thumbnails probably should not follow
> the algorithm for giving group and other write permissions.
>
>
> > GdkPixbuf*
> > thumb_factory_request_thubmnail (gchar *image_path)
> >
> > It then would try to find exisiting thumbnails or creates a new one if
> > neccessary. If any gnome program needs to implement this functionality
> > seperately this would result in unneccessary code duplication.
>
> First, it would be nice to take a URI rather than a path.
>
> Second, it would probably be useful to have some kind of async
> interface for thumbnailing as well, since thumbnails may be on a
> remote filesystem, and since even if it's local, generating a
> thumbnail can be a slow operation (if the image is really huge for
> instance, or if you are using a plug-in thumnbnailer for a slow to
> render type).

Both of your objections are considered in my code. Should have been more
carefully with my example above :).

> I would suggest just using regular programs rather than bonobo for
> thumbnailing because there's no real need for rich IPC here - you just
> tell the program "thumbnail this image and dump it here" (or you could
> pass it a set of images and a location to dump them, dunno). If there
> happens to be a bonobo component that's good for thumbnailing, you
> could easily write a thumbnailer program that would call it. And for
> some image types, you could easily use ImageMagick with appropriate
> command-line options as a thumbnailing program.
>
> [...]
>
> gnome-vfs really should not depend on gdk-pixbuf, but other than that
> it would be nice for it to have more sophisticated icon support.

I will consider this.

Regards,

   Jens