Nick Lamb wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 12:38:26PM +0200, Sven Neumann wrote:
> > Oh, will you? I am sorry but if I remember correctly we postponed this
> > until after 2.0 since we hope that until then there well be an
> > accepted Free Desktop standard for this. Our prefered solution would
> > be to offer the image data as image/png and so far there seems to be
> > consensus that this is a good choice.
I had hoped to spend time on this before 2.0 pre1, but that's not
going to happen now. And it does kind of break the feature
freeze. But it shouldn't be a huge packet of code.
> Any Free Desktop standard for routine image clipboard handling seems to
> have been overtaken by events. There might still be room for some
> discussion about hi-resolution or hi-precision graphics, but for the
> average user the de facto standard is already set and since there's nothing
> obviously wrong with it we can move on from there. X content negotation lets
> us change our minds later, and GIMP's plug-in architecture lets us make
> this modular if we decide that's necessary...
I'm not aware of any de facto standard - how does kde pass image
data around? The only clipboard standard I know of is the one on
freedesktop which says "Explicit copy -> use SECONDARY", and
keeps the selected buffer = PRIMARY as an easter egg which isn't
really going to be used much in future.
There is no standard for image data interchange that I know of,
and I did have a look.
> Is there any engineering reason why this shouldn't happen prior to 2.0,
> assuming the spirit of Free Time is on our side?
That's a fairly big assumption :) 2.0 pre 1 (which will be
absolutely string & feature frozen to give translators,
documentors and the like time to clean up before 2.0) is planned
for a fortnights time. There are only 2 or 3 blockers left for
that release, and they're all pretty small. So the spirit of Free
Time is the biggest problem I see with it :)
It would be nice if we did this in a way which would
interoperrate with other apps, though - which is why using
image/png is so attractive. Even if we were to use something else
between different gimp instances, we get to communicate with
everyone who understands png.
As to freedesktop, as I said I'm not aware of any standard (de
facto or otherwise) - I had planned to write up a proposal to use
as the basis of a freedesktop proposal after 2.0 pre1 gets out
the door. But if you implement something in the meantime, there
shouldn't be any problem getting it in, as long as it's feature
complete and fairly clean (as Sven said).
Cheers,
Dave.
--
David Neary,
Lyon, France
E-Mail: bolsh@xxxxxxxx
