This is the July 2023 update for Niepce.

The importer

Where we left, the workspace tree view didn't display the hierarchy.

First, I discovered bug in the SQL triggers for folder path update. I was missing the AFTER keyword to have it run after the update.

Workspace

Second, I need to specify a parent when adding items to the model, then locate the parent, add to it. The problem is that we get a list of folders in some order (I can order by any of the SQL columns). The problem is adding an item to a parent that is not yet int the model. There are few ways to go about it.

1. Sort the folder list in order of a flattened tree. To be fair my SQL skills are not good enough, and I'm not even sure I can do that in sqlite. This would solve most of the problems.
2. Sort the folder list once received. But this might not always work.
3. Handle the case in the model: add with a placeholder parent and re-parent as needed when the parent is added.

For now I chose 3. The risk is that if the parent doesn't exist then the tree will stay lingering. It's just the view though.

Here is the result:

This is the June 2023 update for Niepce.

The importer

Back where we left, still working on the import.

It looks like there is more work than anticipated to be able to import a tree a files.

If you are looking for a Software Engineer with strong skills in C, C++, Rust and JavaScript, with a strong FLOSS background, I am available to hire.

My résumé

This is the May 2023 update for Niepce.

Life comes at you fast. And hit hard. tl;dr not as much progress as I wished: I had to put this project a bit more on the sideline.

This will be a short update.

The importer

Some small bits:

Some fixing in the metadata processing on import, notably a better handling of raw files. Turns out the previous logic broke getting metadata from video files.

Also fixing some rexiv2 / gexiv2-sys bugs that are mostly memory leaks.

I am pondering directly binding Exiv2 now that 0.28 got rid of auto_ptr<> that had been deprecated for over a decade. cxx should make this easier. This would automatically resolve the problem above, and I don't need to bind all the API, just what I need.

Forecast

To move forward the importer, I need to fix the recursive creation of folders (it currently flatten them to a single level).

Misc

There are always the other fixes.

Fedora 38

I pulled the trigger and updated to Fedora 38. And Niepce failed to build because of a bug with bindgen with clang 16, that was already fixed, triggered by libgphoto2-sys. Submitted the PR for the crate and we are good to go. The short version is that clang 16 sent different data for anonymous enums, that bindgen 0.60 couldn't handle. But at that bindgen 0.65 was fine.

This is the reason why I always check into git the generated bindings and update them as needed, instead of doing it at build time.

Application ID

I have been using org.gnome.Niepce as an application ID. While it is hosted in the main namespace repositories (it was back in the days of Subversion, to which I am thankful), Niepce is not a core app. Policies with the GNOME project do not allow using that namespace for non core apps. So I had a perform a global change rename. Not a big deal, and it doesn't change anything for users since there is no release. I just needed to get this out of the way.

libopenraw

Pushed a bit on the Rust port to implement metadata extraction. This is driven by the goal of not having three different libraries. Still some parity gaps with the C++ code, but it's closing in. I hope to be able to release 0.4.0 based on the Rust code.

Thanks you for reading.

This is the April 2023 update for Niepce. Between outages caused by an unseasonbly ice storm, squirrels chewing cable, I discovered how painful is being off the grid. This is not the excuse, just the events that lead to downtime and April not being very productive.

The importer moved a little bit forward. I tried to use the brand new "sort by date" importer tool, that is used to test and exercise the logic. The improved importer address a few long standing issues, including not using libgphoto2 for USB Mass Storage, including flash card readers. This was a shortcut I had taken and the result was suboptimal. The new approach is to use libgphoto2 to find the device, and then switch to pure filesystem operations. That was issue 26.

I picked up my camera which I haden't done much since the pandemic started. After a firmware upgrade on the Fujifilm X-T3 (it's a 4 year old model, and the firmware is from this year, unlike most smartphones), I notice a new feature that allow setting a picture as favourite. My first question was "how is it stored?". I put that on my list for later.

After taking some pictures of the newly bloomed spring flowers, I tried the importer. The new files cause a bug with metadata making the importer unable to determine the creation date ; I hit this when trying to sort these new pictures.

This is the March 2023 update for Niepce. This is not an April's fool, and this is not the year I can announce a release on April's fool day. Sorry about that.

Continuing with the renderer / previewer cache.

I had to move ncr to Rust. I didn't port it all, but the widget and the main API are now in a Rust crate npc-craw, the fourth one in the workspace. The goal of this crate is to provide the interface to the rendering pipeline. Some of the work included moving away from Cairo surface and using GdkTextures instead. The main pipeline is still the original C++ code using GEGL, it's easier for me to bind the C++ code than to write wrappers for GEGL.

In the same way, I also ported most of the darkroom module to Rust. This module is the one that will allow the image editing and currently only handle displaying the images.

All of this was necessary to finish the render / previewer integration and making it work asynchronously: the image rendering happen in the background without freezing the UI. There are still some issues but it on overall, it works well.

RawTherapee is one of the two major open source RAW photo processing applications, the other is Darktable.

Can I leverage RawTherapee RAW processing code for use in Niepce? Yes I can.

So let's review of I did it.

This is the February 2023 update.

Not as much direct progress as I wished.

One big change is that now the binary is linked from Rust. And at the same time the autotools buid system is gone. The latter came first, as to not have to ignore it when doing the former.

Several challenges presented themselves with linked the app from Rust.

1. We have to invert the dependency. We'd build the Rust code as a library, generate the headers for the cxx bridge and then build the C++ code, and link it. Instead we generate the headers, build the C++ code as libraries and then the Rust code.
2. We have to figure some tricks: the Rust executable needs to link to some system libraries called directly from the C++ code, and also need to link to asan if needed.

Otherwise, for the two previous topics, namely the importer and the previewer.

This will relate my short learning journey in implementing a procedural macro in Rust: i18n-format.

The problem

Building Rust applications means having to deal with localization, ie allowing the UI to be translated in other languages. This is a big deal for users, and thanks to existing tooling, if you use gtk-rs and if you use the rust-gtk-template to boostrap your project you should be all set. The GNOME community has an history of caring about this and most of the infrastructure is here.

However there is one sore point into this: gettext, the standard package used to handle strings localization at runtime doesn't support Rust. For some reason the patch to fix it is stuck in review.

While it mostly works, the lack of support cause one thing: the getttext! macro that allow the use of localized strings as format is ignored by the xgettext command used to extract and strings and generate the PO template. It is the !, a part of the macro invocation syntax in Rust, that is the blocker. Another problem is that in Rust, for safety reasons, you can only pass a string literal to format!, which is why gettext! exists in the first place.

Until xgettext is fixed, either these strings are missed in the localization process, or you end up reimplementing it with less flexibility. That's what some applications do.

What if I implement a macro that would allow using a function syntax and still use the macro underneath? Oh boy, that mean I need to implement a procedural macro, something I have been dreading because it looks like it has a steep learning curve. It's a topic so complicated that it is glanced over by most books about Rust. Turns out it wasn't that difficult, thanks to a great tooling.

The idea is as follow: convince xgettext to recognize the string. It should look like a plain function, while we need to call a macro.

This is the January 2023 update.

We start the year by a Rust implementation of the file import. It landed very early as the final stretch of work in 2022.

Then a lot of cleanups, removing no longer needed cxx bindings and no longer used C++ code. This also allow removing some "wrapper" type used in the Rust code base.

The other gphoto2-rs patch has also been merged.