Here is a brain dump about XCF and state persistence. It is just food for thought and does not require immediate action for 2.6, except maybe for the handling of the flag GIMP_PARASITE_PERSISTENT:
Some time ago, Peter mentioned that he would like the XCF file format to save all state associated with the image, so that you can reload the file later and continue exactly where you left off. This implies that each XCF file would have to save the state of the image as well as a bit of the GIMP state but we still have to discuss how far we want to go with that. For example: do we save the state of all tools in each XCF file? Do we save the current settings for all plug-ins? Do we allow the user to remove that information before sharing the XCF file with other users? But besides the state of the environment (GIMP tools and plug-ins), we should also ensure that the state of the image is correctly saved. With the current GIMP, this is not perfect because some information about the image exists only in internal (temporary) data structures and some other data is stored in image or layer parasites that are not persistent so these things are not saved in the XCF file. For example, if you save a work-in-progress as XCF and come back to it later, then you may have lost the original file name, you may not be able to recompose layers that were decomposed from another layer and you may get different settings if you save the image as TIFF or JPEG (because the parasites "decompose-data" or "tiff-save-options" are not persistent). If we want to solve some of these problems in 2.6 or later releases, then a first step would be to make all parasites persistent (as if GIMP_PARASITE_PERSISTENT was always included in the flags). We will also have to ensure that all binary parasites handle byte ordering correctly because any XCF file could be loaded later on a different platform. Would there be any objection to making all parasites persistent by default? -Raphaël _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
