Re: GnomeDesktopThumbnail API replacement

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Mon, 2018-01-29 at 15:42 +0000, Debarshi Ray wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 22, 2018 at 12:46:51PM +0000, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> > On 22 January 2018 at 09:28, Philip Withnall <philip tecnocode co.u
> > k> wrote:
> > > From the GLib side of things, my thoughts are that this
> > > shouldn???t live
> > > in GLib, since it deals with pixbufs. As long as it integrates
> > > with
> > > GIO???s thumbnail attribute support, GLib will be happy.
> >
> > We could add a GThumbnail interface, like we did for GIcon,
> > GThemeIcon, and friends.
>
> In the past, I had discussed making the thumbnailing APIs in GLib
> more
> complete with Allison. See:
>   https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686895#c20

I extracted 3 comments which could be relevant to the discussion:

> However, the edits are application-specific [2], so it is not
> reasonable to expect the generic OS-wide thumbnailers to be able to
> handle them.

This is solved/worked-around when using Flatpak, as the cache is
private to the app.

> Secondly, it is important to be able to create and lookup thumbnails
> of a specific size, as opposed to enumerated constants with pre-
> determined presets.

This is a problem with the thumbnail spec's storage section. Jon added
a larger version quite some time ago, and somebody would need to go
through the process to make it any bigger.

> Last but not the least, I find it important to version the cache to
> tide over bugs in the thumbnailer.

You don't need the whole cache to be versioned. Thumbnailers can add
metadata to the thumbnails if they want, and doing:
gdk_pixbuf_save(pixbuf, "/path/to/thumbnail", "png", &error,
                "tEXt::Thumb::Software::Version", "1.0", NULL);
is do-able from within the thumbnailer, and that extra metadata would
be kept.

So there's definitely not much a thumbnailing API could do that you'd
need. The thumbnailing API takes files, and wouldn't make taking 2
sources (file + serialised image operations) possible. You want a
private cache because the on-disk file itself doesn't change. You want
bigger thumbnails, and the spec we implement doesn't allow that.

Thanks for the write-up. Let me know whether I missed anything.

Cheers