Re: [PATCH] Don't show frames around images with an alpha plane

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2009-09-16 at 14:18 +0200, Mark wrote:
> So, the next nautilus version is going to have no decorations on
> images with transparency in them..? (assuming you get the freeze break
> and commit this patch)..
> I hope you do realize that i don't agree with it and that it will
> cause bug reports like: "some thumbnails miss a frame"... WHY can't
> you just count the number of images with transparency in a folder and
> ONLY leave the frame out when all images in a folder have
> transparency? kinda like in my screenshots provided earlier. (this
> one: http://img2.imagedash.com/hrvF.png)

Every decision has advantages and disadvantages. Still, one has to make
a decision even if not everyone likes it.

Ultimately the reason I chose to accept this patch is that it just does
not conceptually work to frame a tranparent item, since the background
will show through inside the frame. It looks nice in your screenshots
because the background is white, but that is not always gonna be the
case.

This is independent to whether there are other framed icons in the
directory. Furthermore, its not really a good idea code-complexity wise
to make per-item decisions on global properties like that. The global
property can change at any time and e.g. an added file could suddenly
force us to frame all icons.

Another alternative would be to frame the transparent icons after
overlaying them on some background, but that would loose some of the
information availible about the file (that its transparent), so this
isn't really a great idea either.