After the quick feedback that I got on IRC, I think that I shouldclarify a few things... If I understood correctly what Peter was suggesting some time ago,this was about making sure that the XCF files contain all theinformation necessary to continue your work in such a way that itwould make no difference if you close GIMP and reload the XCF file(s)or if you just continue working without closing GIMP in the meantime. Of course there are some conflicting goals here: XCF was not designedas a "save workspace" format that would include all open images (notjust one) and the complete state of the user interface includingwindow positions, tool state, etc. And personally, I do not thinkthat we should go in that direction because that would belong to a new"GIMP workspace" file format that would not be an image file formatlike XCF is supposed to be. I deliberately included the examplesabout tools and plug-ins in my previous mail because I wanted to seehow other developers would react. And it looks like mitch reactedstrongly on IRC. ;-) However, if you consider only the information that is directly relatedto each image, then it would make sense to save as much of it aspossible in the XCF file so that it makes (almost) no difference ifyou close GIMP and re-open the XCF file or if you just continueediting it. So here is a short list of what I think makes sense to include in XCFfiles:- All image parasites and layer/drawable parasites. They should all be persistent - no reason to have exceptions.- All settings of file plug-ins, because these settings should be associated with each image (e.g., using image parasites) instead of using global last vals. It does not make sense to save the settings of other plug-ins (filters) because these are usually shared globally and would change if you load/save several images.- Some other image data that is currently in internal data structures and not in parasites. For the file name, the best solution may be to keep the current get/set_filename() functions using the internal file name (which would change once the file is reloaded from XCF) but add a new gimp-file-name or gimp-original-file-name parasite so that it is still possible to associate an image with its original file. -Raphaël_______________________________________________Gimp-developer mailing listGimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
