Re: [Tracker] fd.o compliant thumbnailing

[Erlend Davidson <E R M Davidson sms ed ac uk>]

On 14 Jan 2007, at 00:22, Jamie McCracken wrote:

> a few snags:
>
> 1) do a svn update - bits of quite old code are in your patch
>
> 2) I dont like the fact that we are parsing desktop files and  
> checking gconf every time the thumbnailer is called.
Thunar caches the thumbnailers in a binary file in the user's home  
directory, so that even between runs of thunar it doesn't have to  
reparse all the thumbnailers.

What directories are the .desktop files and the thumbnailers stored  
in?  Just thinking that since the filenames are now completely  
abstract/arbitrary, it might be wise to append -tracker to the  
filenames, and perhaps -thunar to the thunar ones, to avoid a file- 
collision.

Also, -scale considerably faster than -thumbnail, and using the - 
antialias option with convert takes off a little time but makes no  
discernable difference to (most) images (actually the only time you  
can notice it is with pdf or ps documents).

I posted on the xdg fd.o list about having a standard for  
thumbnailers.  It didn't really take off, and seems to have turned  
into a discussion about changing the standard for thumbnails.  The  
posts are here: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2007- 
January/thread.html.

> We need to be smarter than that - perhaps stick a GHashTable for  
> mime->thumbnailer in the tracker struct (tracker-utils.h) and load  
> all the thumbs/mime at trackerd startup rather than each time we  
> index a file. That way we can quickly get at the thumbnailer for a  
> mime while indexing.
>
> 3) tracker-thumbnailer should set an alarm for the thumbnailer it  
> spawns (just in case of reap failure).
>
> if it plays out well we could adopt the same desktop format for  
> text filters (and metadata extractors too once I have altered the  
> code for that to support external ones like strigii's xmlindexer  
> and third party ones as well)
>
> --
> Mr Jamie McCracken
> http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/