On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 14:36:25 +0200, Bryan Ford <baford@xxxxxxx> wrote: > 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/ [...] > 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. :) The best forum to discuss this proposal is probably the xdg-list. This is where things like the thumbnail managing standard (which you mentioned in your proposal) have been discussed. For more info about this list, see: http://www.freedesktop.org/Main/GettingInvolved If your proposal is adopted as a freedesktop standard, then it is likely that it will find its way into the GIMP and many other applications. I have a few comments on your proposal. Not necessarily some things that should be changed, but maybe you could discuss the pros and cons in a rationale section or in the "alternative approaches" chapter: - Instead of a file containing a MD5 hash or some other signature, you could consider using an empty file or a symbolic link to ".". Neither of them is likely to conflict with normal files used by some application. - If you want to have a non-empty file or symbolic link, what about using the full path to the file? If a cache directory is moved by the user (and not by the application that created it, because such an application would update the path) then maybe it should not be ignored anymore by the backup process. So comparing the path stored in the file or in the symbolic link with the current path of the file could be a good way to check if the directory is still a cache directory or if it is now a copy stored somewhere else by the user. - Some people don't like MixedCase for file names and prefer alllowercase or names_with_underscores. -Raphaël
