Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

Thursday 28 June 2007

Hack week 2007 day 3

Hack week, day 3:

  • polished the Nautilus patch
  • modified the EOG patch to be reconcile data in the same place (not finished yet)
  • tried to learn RPM packaging to provide packages for libopenraw, exempi and raw-thumbnailer
  • raw-thumbnailer code is on gitweb.fdo, at least temporarily.

Tuesday 26 June 2007

Hack week 2007 day 2

Day 2 of hack week: XMP support in nautilus. Today I did:

  • filed 2 bugs in Nautilus to were blocking me. With patch attached. Bug 451242 just prevented the build as Nautilus has to be build with -Werror. Bug 451344 was IMHO a problem loading the metadata that occur when there is a bit too much data in the APP1 markers, which is triggered by JPEG with XMP embedded.
  • filed the third bug, bug 451380 as a feature request with patch attached, and this is the core of the work. Nautilus will show the XMP metadata if they are available. This only works for local files (Exempi cannot read off gnome-vfs) and only JPEG (the later is Nautilus limitation, related to libexif). Screenshot:

Monday 25 June 2007

Hack week 2007 day 1

This week is Hack Week at Novell. Work on the Linux and Free Software project of your choice.

I choose to work on bringing digital camera RAW and metadata.

Several defined goal reached today:

  • Thumbnailing digital camera RAW for Nautilus. The current solution I know and packaged a year and a half ago for Ubuntu was based on dcraw. Mine is based on libopenraw, and is faster. It just handle less format, but this will be solved in the future. In the mean time I discovered that the Debian package of UFRaw was setting UFRaw to produce the thumbnails (using the provided mime-info). So why reinventing the wheel? Because I believe that a solution based on libopenraw is much better integrated and probably much more efficient[1]. Other alternative hacks I have seen require the use of ExifTool (with Perl) or dcraw command-line tool. I have a raw-thumbnailer working, to be released.
  • XMP support in EOG - bug #451101. Patch is attached. This one make use of Exempi 1.99.2 (that I have not released soon). The support is a bit rough in the UI, and only works for JPEG as it is currently a limitation of EOG. I also think that the metadata should be reconciled in one set for clarity.

To be done:

  • XMP support in Nautilus. Same strategy as for EOG. Possibly add it for digital camera RAW files.
  • See if the metadata in EOG can be reconciled (see above).
  • See how to provide support for editing.

Notes

[1] I'm seriously biased :-)