Dear GIMP developers, I'm soliciting feedback, discussion, and hopefully ultimately support for a very simple proposal that I've written up in preliminary form at this page: http://www.brynosaurus.com/cachedir/ The short version: I propose that applications that create and manage on-disk caches of ephemeral or otherwise regenerable content, such as the GIMP's on-disk tile cache, include within their cache directories a standardized "cache directory tag" file with a specific name and containing a specific header. This way, other software such as backup systems, data transfer utilities, and data management tools can easily (if configured to do so by the user) recognize such cache directories that contain "non-precious" data, and avoid wasting storage space and/or network bandwidth on copying around and storing them unnecessarily. Writing such a tag file should amount to a most a 5-10 line addition to caching applications such as GIMP, but could substantially benefit the efficiency of other applications. I don't yet know the best venue for discussion of this proposal (I realize Gimp-developer isn't it, since it's a highly cross-application issue that only slightly affects GIMP itself) - please E-mail me if you're interested and I'll point you to the appropriate forum once I find or create it. Or if you like the idea but just would like me to come back later when the proposal has been more widely peer reviewed by others, I'm happy with that too. :) Thanks, Bryan
