2012/5/9 Debarshi Ray <[email protected]> > > hello from Yorba, makers of Shotwell. > > Hi, Adam! We met in Berlin at the Collabora party during the Desktop > Summit. > You probably remember me as one of the authors of Solang. > > For those who don't know Solang (http://git.gnome.org/browse/solang) > was a photo manager that I wrote during the dying days of GNOME > 2.x. It used Tracker >= 0.7.x as its meta-data store and GEGL (a bit > too ahead of its time, maybe) for editing. The viewing, tagging, > searching was functional, but the editing part was quite rudimentary > when I stopped working on it for various reasons. > > > Shotwell's goals are exactly those laid out in the design document below: > > to be a lightweight, elegant photo browser/viewer for GNOME supporting > > basic manipulation, easy photo sharing/publishing, slideshows and so on. > > ??If the GNOME team feels that Shotwell has failed in meeting those > goals, > > we're highly interested in discussing how Shotwell could be enhanced or > > improved to get there. > > Well, one thing, I guess we all agree, is that reinventing the wheel > is bad. Especially so for a project like ours. > > Having said that, one thing which I have always complained about > Shotwell was the fact that it asks me to import my photos into what > looks like a private SQLite database. A quick "git grep sqlite" does > reveal some dependency on it. You would remember that I discussed > with you and Jim Nelson in Berlin about the possibility of using > Tracker instead. At that point you had reservations about Tracker and > were reluctant to use it. Tracker is a complex beast and there are > consequences in having a hard dependency on it. >
> But today, the Documents application has a hard dependency on > Tracker. It uses it for querying documents, marking them as favourite, > and so on. And in many ways, the Photos application is very closely > related to Documents. So, while one can find ways to implement the > same using a different technology, does it really make sense to > diverge so much in the underlying implementation for these core > applications? Or should we try to stay as close to each other > possible and consolidate on the underlying foundations? > > Secondly, Boxes, Documents and Photos (can potentially) share a lot of > widgets. > That's not a reason at all, Yorba seems open to work on making Shotwell more GNOME 3 friendly... so those widgets can be shared anyway > Therefore, for these reasons, if you look at the gnome-photos tree, it > is almost a clone of the gnome-documents application. > > So from Shotwell's point of view, would it make sense to replace its > existing SQLite store and UI? Would it not be as good as writing from > scratch? > No. That makes as much sense as saying that Epiphany should have been written from scratch when the "Web" designs were proposed. We had a browser, a new design, and developers happy to follow those deisgns. Writing software from scratch is almost always a bad idea: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html Shotwell is widely deployed and used, it has a team of people working on it, and a commercial backer. These are VERY important things, prolly the most important things to take into account, you worry too much about the data store technologies, Tracker is great, but it is by no means the only accepted data store in the desktop. If Yorba is open to follow the designs from the GNOME design team, I can't see any reason why we shouldn't go that way. IMHO is the quickest and more sustainable path to have a great photo browsing experience for GNOME 3. -- Cheers, Alberto Ruiz
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