Re: thumbs.el and transparency

[Nick Roberts]

 > Nick Roberts <address@hidden> writes:
 > 
 > >  > Could you change it to generate thumbnail images according to the
 > >  > Thumbnail Managing Standard?
 > >
 > > I've not even heard of the Thumbnail Managing Standard.  Does it deal with
 > > transparency?  Or is it a tangential question?
 > 
 > From what I remember the standard uses PNG files only, and as far as I
 > know, PNG supports 

I think Richard's point is that we should only follow a standard that does
what we want.  If the Thumbnail Managing Standard doesn't deal with
transparency, then it seems unsuitable (the toolbar icons in the images
directory have transparency, for example). 

 > >  > I now have 4 (!) thumbnail directories that all share the same purpose:
 > >  > 
 > >  > ~/.emacs-thumbs
 > >  > ~/.emacs.d/thumbs
 > >  > ~/.thumbnails
 > >  > ~/.tumme
 > >  > 
 > >  > This is ridiculous.  Let's unify them all before the release.
 > 
 > I think it's fun! :)
 > 
 > Seriously, yes, it is kinda silly.

~/.emacs-thumbs is redundant now.  An individual user will probably just
use one primarily, so although not desirable, it may not be critical.

 > > Unifying them presupposes an understanding of the requirements.  By all
 > > accounts both thumbs and tumme are immature, so I'm not sure that we're
 > > at that stage yet (I'm certainly not).
 > 
 > Before Richard allowed tumme.el into Emacs I tried to copy as many
 > features from thumbs.el as possible into tumme.el. Everything is not
 > there yet, but its on the todo-list.

I mean unifying the thumbnail directories not thumbs.el and tumme.el.

 > Tumme and thumbs are in many ways very similar. They display
 > thumbnails of pictures, you can act on those thumbnails to do various
 > things (display, manipulate etc), they are somewhat integrated in
 > dired etc. Why do we need two packages for doing this?

We've covered this before: thumbs is simpler and best suited for basic tasks,
tumme for more complex ones.

 >                                                      Of course, I
 > like tumme better, else I wouldn't have written it, but this isn't
 > some ego-thing, if someone thought that. I would be equally glad to
 > merge tumme stuff into thumbs and make that the main thumbnial/image
 > viewer, although for me that would be harder to do then the other way
 > around.

I think they should be seen as complementary, not competing.

 > What I would like is much more input from a user's perspective, in
 > what areas tumme lacks compared to thumbs.

I don't think you'll get much feedback until Emacs is released.  tumme is a
specialist package and those on emacs-devel generally don't have that
specialism.

Nick