[Thunar-dev] dcraw thumbnailer

[Erlend Davidson]

Mike Massonnet wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 08, 2007 at 08:02:28PM +0000, Erlend Davidson wrote:
>   
>> There is a postscript thumnailer in there too now. This is a tad slow 
>> (worst is 3 seconds per file), and I don't see that being a fixable 
>> problem - it's just the way postscript is stored. I was thinking about a 
>> couple of things in relation to this. It might be an idea to give 
>> thumbnailers a priority in the .desktop files - keep the slowest ones 
>> until last, and to give a way out if there is ever a conflict between 
>> two thumbnailers wanting to do the same mimetype (i.e. choose the 
>> fastest one which has all of TryExec satisfied)?
>>     
>
> What about using the directory /dev/shm (if it exists) to do the
> compilation?  For the record, it is a filesystem in RAM which is
> noticeably faster than hard-disk access.
Making a thumbnail for postscript is very easy, I just call 
ImageMagick's convert program - there is no middle stage that I could 
place on /dev/shm, if that's what you meant?  If anybody knows of a 
faster means of generating a thumbnail of postscript please say.

I think the priorities would be very useful, for example if I wanted to 
implement two means to produce a postscript thumbnail, but one of those 
is a lost faster and depended on some unusual program that not many 
would have installed.  I'd want to give the faster one a higher 
priority, so that out of the two it is chosen when possible.