[2/4] tools: enable .lnk thumbnailing in Gnome

[Damjan Jovanovic]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 2:54 AM, Scott Ritchie <scott at open-vote.org> wrote:
> On 07/26/2010 03:57 AM, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
>> Damjan Jovanovic <damjan.jov at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> diff --git a/tools/Makefile.in b/tools/Makefile.in
>>> index a9ec324..a0c9c99 100644
>>> --- a/tools/Makefile.in
>>> +++ b/tools/Makefile.in
>>> @@ -75,6 +75,8 @@ install install-lib:: wine.inf $(INSTALLDIRS)
>>>      $(INSTALL_DATA) $(SRCDIR)/l_intl.nls $(DESTDIR)$(datadir)/wine/l_intl.nls
>>>      $(INSTALL_DATA) $(SRCDIR)/wine.desktop $(DESTDIR)$(datadir)/applications/wine.desktop
>>>      -$(UPDATE_DESKTOP_DATABASE)
>>> +    gconftool --set -t string /desktop/gnome/thumbnailers/application at x-ms-shortcut/command "wine winemenubuilder -t %i %o" || true
>>> +    gconftool --set -t bool /desktop/gnome/thumbnailers/application at x-ms-shortcut/enable "true" || true
>>
>> There needs to be a better way of doing this. Probably filing a bug with
>> freedesktop.org is in order.
>>
>
> For sure.  Thumbnailers are just shell scripts, but there is currently
> no cross distro way to enable them.
>
> My current "solution" is to just do this at the packaging layer and
> ignore KDE entirely until someone tells me the equivalent of installing
> gconf schemas, but this is obviously not good.
>
> Thanks,
> Scott Ritchie
>
>
>

freedesktop.org has a spec for a shared thumbnail cache
(http://triq.net/~jens/thumbnail-spec/index.html), but no accepted
spec for a file browser to request that a file be thumbnailed: there's
a draft DBUS thumbnailing spec that's been heavily discussed last year
but it still isn't ready or adopted by any/most desktops
(http://live.gnome.org/ThumbnailerSpec).

I was thinking that what we could do, is when we generate a .lnk file
on the desktop, we also write a thumbnail for it to the shared
thumbnail cache - that way the desktop environment doesn't need to ask
us to generate a thumbnail since it already exists. But then the cache
could be cleared out periodically meaning we'd eventually lose the
thumbnail. Winemenubuilder could work around this by regenerating all
thumbnails that are missing on every startup. But even if this is
acceptable solution, it's still hard to implement, because the
thumbnail cache spec requires specific thumbnail sizes (128x128 or
256x256) and a special pixel format (256 colour indexed-mode PNG IIRC)
which means we'd need to resize and colour convert the icon(s), and it
needs special PNG comments on the thumbnails which windowscodecs
doesn't support even on Windows AFAIK. So is this idea viable?

Thank you
Damjan Jovanovic