Bug 442808

* Sun May 04 2008 Pavel "Stalwart" Shevchuk <stlwrt> - 0.3.0.012-2
- Added missing dependencies for epsilon-devel
- Fixed timestamp of source tarball
- Preserve timestamps of installed files

New spec: http://rpm.scwlab.com/epsilon-goes-rawhide/epsilon.spec
New SRPM: http://rpm.scwlab.com/fedora/e/9/epsilon-0.3.0.012-2.x86_64/
epsilon-0.3.0.012-2.fc9.src.rpm
Built RPMs: http://rpm.scwlab.com/fedora/e/9/

I'll let Rex do the review, but I already have 2 comments.

The plugin is not properly packaged, indeed the shared object
is dlopened and not linked, so there is no need to have ldconfig
run in the xine subpackage postscripts. And devel should not depend
on the xine subpackage either.

A dot is missing at the end of the %description.

Third comment from myself - -devel package doesn't depend on pkgconfig. Will fix
this evening

* Thu May 15 2008 Pavel "Stalwart" Shevchuk <stlwrt> - 0.3.0.012-3
- Added missing pkgconfig to buildrequires and requires of epsilon-devel
- Removed unneded ldconfig call for epsilon-xine
- Removed epsilon-devel dependency on epsilon-xine

New spec: http://rpm.scwlab.com/epsilon-goes-rawhide/epsilon.spec
New SRPM: http://rpm.scwlab.com/fedora/e/9/epsilon-0.3.0.012-3.fc9.x86_64/
epsilon-0.3.0.012-3.fc9.src.rpm
Built RPMs: http://rpm.scwlab.com/fedora/e/9/

Everything looks good on the packaging side, but the resulting 
software seems barely usable. There is no documentation, I tested
epsilon and epsilon_thumbd but it doesn't lead to anything, and 
epsilon_thumb_test outputs a lot but doesn't seems to do anything 
either.

I don't see any use for such standalone thumbnailer either, but library is used 
in various E-Apps, including E17 filemanager, for generating picture and video 
file thumbnails.

If it is so, maybe the libs could be in a -libs package, or the programs
could be in an -utils package.

Took a brief look at code.

epsilon takes path to file and returns grep/sed friendly output with path to 
thumbnails and other info. Could be used in shellscripts.

epsilon_thumbd is needed for asynchronous API to work, library starts this 
daemon when async API is called with no daemon running

epsilon_test could be removed, don't see any practical use for it

(In reply to comment #8)
> epsilon takes path to file and returns grep/sed friendly output with path to 
> thumbnails and other info. Could be used in shellscripts.

Ok.

> epsilon_thumbd is needed for asynchronous API to work, library starts this 
> daemon when async API is called with no daemon running

I don't like that. A library should not start a daemon, especially
a library that does thumbnails!

> A library should not start a daemon

GNOME does that with gconf, dbus. KDE does that with sycoca and kdeinit. 
Pulseaudio may do that in near future. On modern SMP systems forking off 
daemons and talking to them via IPC is way to go.

I dislike it too. If I had reviewed those packages, and I had
noticed this, I would haven't been happy either. However there
may be sound technical reasons, for example for gconf I can imagine
that a daemon is needed for serialization. And dbus is rather natural
since it is a session-wide desktop system daemon which is used
for all the notifications. kde I don't know.

Here, I find it especially unneeded. Is there a specific need?

(In reply to comment #10)
> > A library should not start a daemon
> 
> GNOME does that with gconf, dbus. KDE does that with sycoca and kdeinit. 
> Pulseaudio may do that in near future. On modern SMP systems forking off 
> daemons and talking to them via IPC is way to go.

Forgot to say that I think that it is very wrong to have pulseaudio 
daemon started by a library.

E filemanager doesn't start thumbd generating thumbs. Even for folders with 
many images. No idea what apps use this API. Having separate daemon for 
thumbnailing would be useful for search engine crawlers which may have 
impressive queue.

Why would search engine need to do thumbnailing?

To allow photo management application to draw timeline of photos for example. 
Dunno =)

Anyway, even though I really dislike that kind of design, I won't
block it.

* rpmlint can be ignored
epsilon-devel.i386: W: no-documentation
epsilon-xine.i386: W: no-documentation
* follow packaging guidelines
* free software license included
* match upstream
915e8f29d1de2ec676bbfe3baefe5cdf  epsilon-0.3.0.012.tar.bz2
* %files section right
* library and plugin rightly packaged

- the library starts a daemon, it is something I really dislike. But it 
is more an upstream issue I won't block the review because of that.

APPROVED


Rex, you set the review flag to ?, do you have comments?

New Package CVS Request
=======================
Package Name: epsilon
Short Description: Small, display independent, and quick thumbnailing library
Owners: stalwart
Branches: F-8 F-9
InitialCC:
Cvsextras Commits: yes

cvs done.

Epsilon hit rawhide. Thanks to everyone!