GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 740975
Move gnome-epub-thumbnailer to gnome-books?
Last modified: 2021-07-05 11:32:21 UTC
The gnome-epub-thumbnailer package contains 2 thumbnailers, one for epub books, and one for mobi books. We're unlikely to support mobi books for a while, but the epub thumbnailer is necessary for gnome-books to be useful and thumbnails to be visible. Should we move the epub thumbnailer here?
In general, thumbnailers are system/platform components, and I never liked the approach of shipping them with applications; my favorite approach would be to have a gnome-thumbnailers repo that includes them all. If that sounds too much, or you don't agree, I'd rather keep it outside of gnome-documents. One should not need to install gnome-documents to have epub or mobi files thumbnailed in the file manager.
(In reply to comment #1) > In general, thumbnailers are system/platform components, and I never liked the > approach of shipping them with applications; Not that much of a difference when the applications are shipped with the system. It was certainly very helpful in the days when we had less libraries and writing a thumbnailer was like writing a big portion of the application. > my favorite approach would be to > have a gnome-thumbnailers repo that includes them all. > If that sounds too much, or you don't agree, I'd rather keep it outside of > gnome-documents. One should not need to install gnome-documents to have epub or > mobi files thumbnailed in the file manager. gnome-documents is installed by default, and gnome-documents will probably contain the only application capable of reading epubs on a default Fedora install. I would expect thumbnailed files to be readable...
(In reply to comment #2) > Not that much of a difference when the applications are shipped with the > system. It was certainly very helpful in the days when we had less libraries > and writing a thumbnailer was like writing a big portion of the application. I buy that in some cases having the thumbnailer share code with the application can make it easier to write it, but I'm not really sure that's the case anymore (and that's definitely not true for this case). In any event, my point is we're moving towards a world where applications are generally not shipped with the system; thumbnailers instead are generally shared between all applications and all users and need to live in /usr, so they're system components in that sense. > gnome-documents is installed by default, and gnome-documents will probably > contain the only application capable of reading epubs on a default Fedora > install. I would expect thumbnailed files to be readable... It might be installed by default on Fedora, but I'm not sure that's true for all distributions... Anyway, I don't want to turn this into a big debate on the future of thumbnailers, as the world I mention above is not yet a reality. If you strongly feel for merging the thumbnailer here and can provide a patch/volunteer to look at later bugs for it, I won't oppose it but I still think that time would be better spent towards a more future-proof solution.
Reassigning to new default assignee.
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