I have some questions regarding the loading of non-photo media and about the Imaging code. I would like some feedback mainly from developers, but users can feel free to pitch in too.
Some of you on IRC may have noticed that Alex Polvi and I were hacking on getting F-Spot to load videos. (see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=166038) As I see it, there are three ways to go about this: 1. Trick F-Spot into thinking that videos are just images (ie. of the ImageFile class) 2. Make a separate, parallel VideoFile class to deal with them 3. Generalize the current ImageFile class to MediaFile, and have ImageFile and VideoFile both inherit from this base class. Going with options 1 or 3 would allow most existing code to function with minor modifications. Using option 2 would require more changes to code, as we would have to handle video files specially, and separate from image files, whenever they are encountered. On the bug page (see above for a link) the patch by Alex uses option 1, and the latest patch by me uses option 3 (please note that neither are totally complete, though both are usable). My patch also addresses some other issues, such as making non-applicable buttons (edit, crop, print, export, etc) inactive. (I'm going to jump to the questions now before this email gets too long). Q1. What do you think is the best way to structure the classes (of the three options above) Q2. If we add video support, where do we draw the line with F-Spot? Obviously we don't want to make a full file manager with a slideshow function. But a good rule of thumb might be that we should handle everything, and only, what a digital camera can take. Right now, I believe that is photos, videos, and audio clips (which I think are attached to photos). Q3. Assuming we add video support, what features would be necessary? I think editing should be left up to an external editor, although it might be feasible to do very simple things like truncating or adding a title screen (compare to what we do with photos, for instance). Exporting to services like YouTube would be quite nice as well. Q4. What is the minimum amount of expected functionality required for a patch to be accepted? (ie. there's lots we could do, but we should keep it small first) Thanks in advance -- -Michael Wayne Goodman _______________________________________________ F-spot-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/f-spot-list
