[Shotwell] some general arguments on devel and unix toolbox and so on (Re: Two features I'm really missing ....)

[pt]

On 3 October 2011 23:02, oliver <oliver at first.in-berlin.de> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 03, 2011 at 10:07:42PM +0200, pt wrote:
>> 1. f-spot is SSSSSLLLLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWW, while shotwell
>> seems very fast in comparison;
> [...]
>
> If you switch off the slide-show it at least becomes more usable...

Actually I can't even *get* there: it crashes on me continuously
during imports. I have year-based directories, meaning 2--3 K photos
per dir. It was working OK while I was importing every week a few
photos, but when it screwed my metadata I wanted to take everything
out and when I tried to re-import the fixed files I never managed to
finish before a crash occurred.

> [...]
>> 4. f-spot is no longer being actively developed, and the current
>> version is quite buggy, far from usable.
> [...]
> I thought it just became thrown out from Ubuntu-distri.
> Didn't know it'a already a dead project.

It is not dead, yet, but its future is quite uncertain:

http://old.nabble.com/Being-honest-about-the-development-of-f-spot-to32472621.html

The debian maintainer posted about his wish to stop shipping it in
distribution releases. It seems some of the developers kinda agreed
with that picture.

>> 5. last but not least, f-spot is written in C# (or whatever they call
>> it) and uses the `mono' libraries, thus I guess one can not easily
>
> Thats one of the wrongest way to do it?
> Picking up M$ crap ideas and port it to the free world.

I agree completely. It is on the list of things I don't like about
f-spot. Plus, my main computer is a three-year-old Eeepc 900, so I
really don't have that much space for libraries used by just *one*
application.

> But it's also wrong doing it the other way around, isn't it?
>
>  http://www.fefe.de/nowindows/

I'm not sure about that: some people are *forced* to use Windows, and
I feel like a bit of fresh air will do them good ;-)

I use Linux since 1999 and Debian since 2000, but when I was working
in engineering companies I just *had* to use Windows because (at least
in italy) everybody was using AutoCAD. But I used it with Gimp,
Blender, Inkscape, Scribus, OpenOffice and whatever libre software I
could.

>> A. I use Geeqie
>
> Never heard of it before.

Give it a try: it is a neat piece of software (offspring of GQview).

>> B. I use ExifTool to do more complex mass-tagging, like conditionally
>> removing or renaming a specific tag recursively into directories, or
>> adding several tags of copyright informations, locations and such.
>
> Heard of it, but not used it so far.

I guess it is pretty much the standard when it comes to metadata management.

> I also use Gimp, but it#s a pitty that it does not allow more than 8-Bit
> editing so far. But this gap will be changed... just don't know when.
>
> There are some other pic-edtors which do better in this respect.
> Just forgot the names. I could look for them if you are interested.

Thanks, I checked Darktable, it has a nice original interface.
Still the Gimp is way more mature.

> the shotwell-team seems to be interested to make shotwell really becoming good.
> So I think it will become better and better. I'm confident here, and hope I
> have the right impressions ...)

Same here. It is growing pretty fast, although I still miss many
tag-related features of f-spot, namely keyboard-based tagging,
multiple-tag select, keyboard-based search bar with logical AND and
OR.

> At the moment I just want to mention: that shotwell is well supporting
> keyboard, makes ist a superior tool to many other picture tools, which do it
> rather half-heartedly...

Not sure about that: I am having troubles using shotwell because it
asks me for too many mouse clicks, but maybe it's just me not yet used
to it.

> One strange issue is somehow, that it uses "just another programming language".
> vala is not well known.

I thought vala was just a C compiler: is shotwell not straight C?

> It was emacs that was intende to become a coffee machine ;-)

Yeah, it was the next step after having become an operating system:
last time I checked emacs was already at that stage ;-)

Ciao ciao!
Piergi soon-to-be-a-Berliner
-- 
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GNU/Linux user 190604